Leadership Development for an Era of Perpetual Change: Moving Beyond the Myth of Stability

The announcement of new trade tariffs and restrictions has sent many organizations scrambling to adapt their supply chains and operations. But beneath these tactical responses lies a deeper challenge: the deeply human expectation that tomorrow will largely resemble today and yesterday. This expectation—this reliance on precedent and pattern—has served humanity well for millennia. It has been fundamental to how we learn, plan, and operate. It has been, until recently, a largely reliable foundation for business decision-making.

Yet the convergence of technological acceleration and geopolitical transformation has profoundly disrupted this foundation.

Beyond trade volatility, leaders at every level face an unprecedented convergence of transformative forces: artificial intelligence reshaping work, evolving employee expectations around wellbeing, and pressure to fundamentally rethink business models in response to sustainability imperatives and technological change.

This context helps explain why our recent Embracing the Transformation of Leadership research found that most leaders (56%) feel burned out, while 43% have experienced the turnover of more than half their leadership team in the past year.

Letting go of our expectation that things will continue much as they were is deeply challenging. It requires us to consciously override mental models that have served us well throughout our careers.

This is not just an intellectual exercise but an emotional journey that every leader—from front-line supervisor to CEO—must undertake.

The Hidden Cost of Our Stability Bias

While the term "stability bias" has been used in memory research to describe how people underestimate their future changes in perspective, we use it here to describe something broader: the natural human tendency to use historical precedent as our primary guide for decision-making.

This orientation has been reinforced by traditional leadership development, which teaches leaders to analyze past patterns, identify best practices, and implement proven solutions. While this approach served well in an era of relative predictability, it creates three significant problems today:

1. It treats change as an aberration rather than a constant, leading organizations to expend enormous emotional and operational energy trying to "return to normal"
2. It creates anxiety and resistance when changes overlap and compound, as leaders struggle to find historical analogues for unprecedented situations
3. It implicitly positions leaders as stability providers rather than adaptation enablers, hampering their ability to help their teams thrive in flux

Reframing Leadership for Perpetual Evolution

The emerging trade landscape offers a perfect case study for how leadership development needs to evolve. As noted in recent Harvard Business Review analysis, companies must simultaneously manage immediate disruptions while building long-term adaptive capabilities. This dual horizon—requiring both immediate response and systematic transformation—characterizes virtually every major challenge leaders face today.

Rather than teaching leaders to "manage change," we need to develop their capacity to:

1. Embrace Strategic Experimentation

Leaders at all levels must move beyond seeking perfect solutions based on past experience. Instead, they need to become comfortable with hypothesis-driven experimentation, rapid learning, and iterative adaptation. This requires not just new skills but a fundamental shift in how they view their role—from providing answers to asking better questions.

2. Build Collective Resilience

A leader's emotional response to change cascades through their team. When leaders treat disruption as a crisis, they trigger anxiety and resistance throughout their organizations. Instead, leaders must learn to model and foster what we might call "pragmatic optimism"—the ability to acknowledge challenges while maintaining confidence in their team's ability to adapt and learn.

3. Navigate Multiple Transformations

The days of dealing with changes sequentially are over. Modern leaders must help their teams navigate multiple simultaneous transformations. This requires developing new mental models for understanding how different changes interact and compound, along with the ability to help teams maintain focus and wellbeing amid complexity.

The Role of Senior Leadership

For organizations to make this transition, senior leaders must first internalize this new paradigm themselves and then actively help their leadership teams at all levels make the same transition. This means:

• Explicitly acknowledging that stability is no longer the default state
• Reframing success metrics to focus on adaptive capability rather than just operational efficiency
• Creating space for experimentation and learning, even amid pressure for immediate results
• Modeling healthy responses to uncertainty and change
• Supporting middle managers and front-line supervisors in developing these capabilities in their own teams

Internalizing this new paradigm means changing the nature of leadership, not just in the abstract but at the day-to-day level. In a recent article titled The CEO as elite athlete: What business leaders can learn from modern sports, McKinsey’s Bob Sternfels and Daniel Pacthod noted that the “hard-driving, my-way-or-the-highway CEO” is increasingly a relic of the past.

Instead, high-performing leaders of today will “introduce themselves with a self-deprecating anecdote, rather than a tale of exploits. They talk about their constant journey to build their resilience muscle.” This resilience in the face of change defines modern leadership.

Conclusion: Leading the Normalization of Change

The fundamental shift required is not just in what leaders do but in how they—and their organizations—think about change itself. Rather than seeing change as a sign that something has gone wrong, leaders at every level must help their teams recognize it as evidence of their engagement with reality itself.

This represents both a challenge and an opportunity. Organizations that can make this shift—developing leaders who are genuinely comfortable with perpetual evolution—will find themselves with a significant competitive advantage.

More importantly, they will create more resilient, adaptable, and ultimately more sustainable organizations that can transform disruption into momentum.

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About the author

Robert Klein is Global Experience Design Lead for Leadership Development at LHH. A former learning tech CLO and machine learning GTM leader, he is a culture and leadership development consultant, product designer, and technologist with 15 years working at the intersection of people, technology, meaning, and business results. He lives in Bellingham, Washington, USA.