A new piece from Human Resources Director, “Leaders overestimate their readiness for change”, contains a statistic that should make every leadership team uncomfortable. 87% said that they were not prepared for change. We keep talking about disruption as if the problem is seeing it coming. It isn’t.
The problem is what happens when it arrives.
Readiness is not awareness
Most executives are perfectly capable of listing the forces changing their business. AI. Automation. Geopolitics. Demographics. Climate. Regulation. New competitors. New business models. That doesn’t mean they are ready for them. This is one of the central arguments in my book, STOP PREDICTING: 13 Lessons from 1,400 Attempts to See What Was Coming.
I spent years trying to anticipate what might happen next. I was wrong roughly 80% of the time. Eventually, I realised that being wrong wasn’t the problem. The mistake was assuming prediction was the objective. The real objective is building the capacity to notice change, question assumptions, make decisions, and adapt faster when reality refuses to follow the plan.
The dangerous predictions
The same research found that 44% of leaders failed to recognise that their own behaviour had become negative during disruption. Where leadership behaviour deteriorated, productivity fell more than twice as fast. That is not a technology problem. It is not a forecasting problem. It is a leadership capacity problem. Under pressure, organisations don’t suddenly become adaptive. They expose the capabilities, habits, and culture they already have.
The present eats the future
The article makes another important point. Leaders spend so much time keeping today’s organisation running that thinking seriously about tomorrow becomes almost optional. Allocating time to the future is an act of discipline. Strategic sensing cannot be something you do at the annual strategy offsite. It needs to become part of the operating rhythm. The future leaks into the present through weak signals, strange technologies, changing customer behaviour, new entrants, and things that initially look irrelevant.
How quickly can you discover that you are not ready?
Instead of trying to create certainty, you deliberately expose assumptions. You run scenarios. You look for signals that contradict the strategy. You rehearse uncomfortable decisions. You test options before you need them. The article calls this building “dynamic capabilities”: developing the organisational ability to change how you change. I call it future fitness. You cannot predict exactly what will hit you. You can build the organisational muscle to respond when it does.
Prediction creates confidence. Fitness creates options.
The future winner will not necessarily be the company with the cleverest forecast. It will be the company that notices earlier, admits faster that its assumptions are wrong, creates more options, and moves before everyone else.
