McKinsey Classics | February 2024

Confronting complexity during transformative times

Leaders today are no strangers to disruption: geopolitical conflicts, climate-related challenges, and a dizzying array of new technologies reshaping companies the world over, to name but a few. Beyond the obvious business implications, the sheer cognitive load that results from attempting to navigate these forces can be overwhelming. Faced with this competing complexity, it’s all too easy to rely on old habits to steer oneself through. But the bold leaders among us embrace the uncertainty at hand, learn from it, and use it to develop their teams—and themselves.

To better navigate the complexity, leaders can adopt five practices to help create the kind of agile mindset shift that disruptive times demand: pause to move faster (detach from the challenge to find a solution); embrace your ignorance (listen from a place of not knowing); radically reframe the questions (ask challenging questions to unblock your mental model); set direction, not destination (lead with vision, not just objectives); and test your solutions—and yourself (create safe-to-fail experiments to spark winning ideas).

Complex times require changing our relationship with complexity. To learn how, read Sam Bourton, Johanne Lavoie, and Tiffany Vogel’s 2018 McKinsey Quarterly classic, “Leading with inner agility.”

— Drew Holzfeind, editor, Chicago