Thoughts on the next era of leadership.
I have to admit that, when I read the most recent McKinsey research on The State of Organizations 2026, I felt validated. Maybe even vindicated. I imagine many of my colleagues nodding and thinking, “same.” But for those of you who haven’t tackled the 74-page document, I thought I’d dedicate a few posts to unpacking some of the insights that I came away with.
The study begins by identifying three tectonic forces driving organizational change. (I’d add they affect personal change, too, because I’m a social animal.)
- Technology, particularly AI, is redefining how work gets done.
- Geopolitics and economic fragmentation are reshaping supply chains, partnerships, and global strategies.
- Workforce expectations are evolving faster than most leadership models.
The fact that these forces are both interdependent and, at times, in collision with each other, is what makes this pace of change feel different from what we’ve seen in the past. It’s not only faster, but constant, and the direction that forces change is shifting, too. Up, down. Forward, backward. I’ve seen (to my dismay) too many large corporations quietly abandoning DEI policies as they try to mirror the geopolitical environment. (Good luck with that.) But to be honest, every organization is challenged to navigate today’s stormy seas, where even the signals we habitually monitor are themselves shifting with the daily headlines. It feels as if the kind of change we expect has itself changed.
The result is that organizations are being forced to rethink how they create value. It’s not just what they do (the products or services they provide), it’s how they operate. This is a mandate for leadership itself to shift and rethink everything they once thought foundational. Because in the era of tectonic plate collisions, there’s little return on optimizing for efficiency or short-term productivity when the rules can change tomorrow.
Leaders must learn to design organizations that can adapt continuously, and that requires at least four things:
- Simpler operating models that can be dismantled, updated, or reassembled like a Lego model;
- Clearer priorities, so that even if tactics get blurry and directions shift, the goal remains sharply in view;
- Quicker decision making, which requires leaders to move before all the data points are in (scary) and to empower people to make time-critical decisions without waiting for consensus or approval (super scary);
- Encouraging stronger cultures of trust and learning, which is the only way to make the strategic imperatives listed above work.
We know that the greatest organizational success stories come out of periods of great disruption. Failures, too. Indeed, that’s why the McKinsey metaphor works—actual tectonic plate movement has been a singular driver of global biodiversity; the species that thrive are those that adapt to the unique emerging habitats.
The next few years will reward leaders who can design their organizations to ride the tectonic shifts better than their competitors. This requires that they learn to read signals early and adapt before the environment forces them to. As my friend Bruce Mau reminds us, anything that we don’t do by design happens by accident.
