As we wrote this book, the COVID-19 pandemic was spreading across the world with an almost incomprehensible effect on hundreds of millions if not billions of lives. For the first time in at least the last fifty years, we faced a crisis that reached all parts of the globe and directly impacted people in every country.

In most cases, this situation was viewed as episodic, something that needed to be weathered before returning to the pre-crisis levels of change, uncertainty, and disruption. This belief was highlighted to us in an inquiry posed by the leader of the U.S. operations of a European company. “I have a question,” she asked. “COVID has actually helped force us to find some new practices that are better than those we employed before the pandemic. I don't want to lose those new practices when COVID-19 is over. So what can we do?”

Implicit in her question is the idea that we can usefully think of this time in three phases: before COVID-19, during the pandemic, and post-COVID-19, when things could settle back into a somewhat better “new normal.” While this is a valid viewpoint, particularly in regard to preserving the positive changes that COVID-19 has thrust upon us, there is a more important lesson to be taken from the crisis.

Lessons from the Crisis

The lesson from the current pandemic, and the high levels of uncertainty we are all feeling as individuals and organizations, is that increased rapid and complex change is becoming the new normal. While what we are experiencing today may feel like a galactic shift that will last a year or so but will then go back to some variation of a steady state, the current crisis is actually just an extreme example of the increasing level of uncertainty that we were already experiencing. The uncertainty index that we presented in the introduction of this book clearly shows a sharp upward trend well before COVID-19 ever infected a single human being.

Zoom out, and you can see that this uncertainty, speed, and volatility is the continuation of a development that has, to a limited degree, been going on for at least 15,000 years, to a larger degree for 150 to 200 years, and unambiguously for the last 4 decades. It is driven most of all by evolving (and sometimes now exploding) technologies and geographic integration. In the chapter on digital transformations, we saw how quickly the Information Age is evolving even compared to the Industrial Age. In addition to the pace, the qualitative nature of the change is also more encompassing, touching both our professional and our personal lives. The restrictions on movement and in-person interactions forced on us by the pandemic have served to highlight and accelerate the digitalization of our lives.

It is not possible to predict exactly how this will manifest itself in terms of economic, health, political, and other issues in 50, 5, or even 1 year. While experts often trace causality once an event has transpired, predicting how future events will play out is much more difficult. The 2008 financial crisis, the fall of the Soviet Union, or the Arab Spring all seemed inevitable in hindsight, but not many people predicted them ahead of time.

What we can predict, based especially on the evidence of the last few hundred years, is that we will continue to see more unanticipated events that include threats (and sometimes huge threats) and opportunities (and sometimes huge opportunities). With the growing interconnectedness of the world today, we can also be sure that these events will increasingly have direct and indirect impacts across the globe, not limited to just one country or one region.

The mismatch between the reality of more change as the new normal and our inclination as human beings and organizations to look for stability has tremendous implications—perhaps most fundamentally that we need to further develop and use the emerging science of change or we risk peril. The good news is that this science and the new methods it gives us for strategic planning, digital transformation, restructuring, and more is actionable, teachable, and has been already shown to produce results that can seem astounding.

Using the Understanding of Human Nature to Handle Growing Uncertainty and Complexity

The advancements of human society over the last few hundred years have resulted in much of the world's population no longer facing literal survival triggers on a frequent basis. However, this development has created even more threats to our status, ego, and reputations that, to our hardwiring, are often indistinguishable from physical attacks. The evolutionary mechanism meant to aid our survival by putting us on high alert in truly threatening situations is in today's world causing almost constant anxiety for many people. Falling stock prices, racial tensions, images of hurricanes and forest fires, and deadly viruses are all perceived as agonizing personal threats.

In this sort of environment, we will undoubtedly face the risk, quite possibly growing, of noise overstimulating the Survive Channel, which in turn shuts down or dampens the Thrive Channel. This is particularly troublesome at a time when we require a more activated Thrive to create the mental/emotional conditions necessary for the curiosity and innovation we need to deal with, and take advantage of, the context in which we live.

The situation is far from hopeless, and the potential negative outcomes are not inevitable. The science of the brain's hardwiring gives us many insights on how to avoid this problem and seize the opportunities that more change brings us. We certainly have enough stories, some summarized in this book, to show the incredible possibilities when the Survive/Thrive system is appropriately engaged, as well as how people have done just that. While our focus has been the organization, many of the lessons apply to how we as individuals can start to drive lasting and beneficial change in our personal and professional lives.

Reconstructing the Modern Organization

As we have seen, the modern organization can in many cases be an anchor on accelerated, sensible, and needed change. A few forward-looking leaders and entrepreneurs, mostly at young technology companies, have recognized that the fundamental design of the modern organizations is unsuited to today's need for speed and agility. These companies are starting to experiment with new organizational structures and new operating systems.

For these companies, particularly early in their lifecycles, the risk aversion, incremental change, and lack of innovation that is too often a byproduct of formal processes and systems is antithetical to their entrepreneurial spirit. The command-and-control structure of formal hierarchies does not fit with their values or the realities of running a rapidly growing company. However, what is also increasingly clear is that a wholesale rejection of the modern organizational system is not the right solution to this problem. With scale and organizational complexity comes the need for robust and reliable management practices. The answer, as we discussed in earlier chapters, is an organizational structure and operating system that is built upon both a robust hierarchy and a changing, evolving network.

The vast majority of people today have never seen the dual operating systems, or the adaptive cultures, that can transform modern organizations into more agile race cars and do so without sacrificing the reliability and consistency of a family sedan.

In the coming new normal, it is a very good bet that the typical form of organizations will change. The big question is: how quickly and how proactively?

Engineering More Leadership from More People to Drive Needed Change

It is also a relatively safe bet that the increasing need for collaboration and teaming in organizations will lead to more and more people providing nontrivial leadership that makes a difference. Roles and job functions have gotten more specialized and the need for integration has accelerated. It is no longer possible for a few leaders at the top of the organization to have all the required information or skills to make good decisions about the diverse activities within a twenty first century dynamic marketplace.

Operationally, this means more people actively looking for meaningful changes in the marketplace, relevant technologies, the financial situation, labor markets, and more; more people helping to create a broad sense of urgency to deal with threats and opportunities; more working with others in coalitions to guide change; more helping to clarify direction and develop strategic initiatives, big and small, for moving in selected directions; more helping with the vast communication challenge in a rapidly shifting, volatile world; more stepping forward to volunteer to go beyond their jobs in a narrow sense and removing barriers so others can too; more new and better results from these efforts in shorter periods of time to create credibility and momentum; more people helping to overcome the forces that lean toward declaring victory too soon; and more seeing the need for, and the methods our emerging theory of change give us, to sustain new ways of operating once achieved.

Operationally, this also means more people embracing the principles, from the emerging science of leading change, that have been used in all the remarkable stories told in this book: the need to draw on not just the select few but the diverse many; the need to go beyond have-to motivation in drawing people in and include want-to; the power of engaging not just the head but the heart; the necessity of operating not just through formal hierarchy and management but more informal networks and leadership.

At the more senior levels in management, one of the most important tasks will increasingly be creating the conditions that encourage leadership from everywhere. The shift in the role of employees within organizations has already started in many contexts and settings. The flatter hierarchy in most Silicon Valley firms, for example, encourages more people to see providing direction, initiative, and leadership as part of their role.

A lot has been written about the expectations of the new generation of workers. What is clear is that for many Millennials the idea of leadership is quite different than previous generations. The role models for business leaders from the last two decades lean more heavily toward inclusion, curiosity, and flexibility than confidence, infallibility, and imposing charisma. This bodes well for the kind of dispersed leadership that will be needed to build organizations that can move fast and pivot quickly.

Another reason to feel encouraged about the development of more leadership is that technological tools, when used appropriately, can be great enablers for individuals to step up in various ways and contribute to leading successful change.

How much will happen here, how quickly, and how uniformly across sectors and regions? Again, that is hard to predict, except to say that the early movers, who use the science of change and the playbooks created for its practical application, will develop a significant competitive advantage.

Back to the Issue of Stakes

Even for mid-sized enterprises, any single organization's success or failure at coming to grips with our increasingly volatile and fast-changing world could affect the lives of many, many thousands of people. We include employees, obviously, but also executives, customers, shareholders, suppliers, and communities. The gap between what is possible on the high end and what is possible on the low end has been growing for decades, and that will surely continue, at least for a while. For a single large organization, and there are thousands of them globally, the number of people who could be touched in an incredibly positive or disturbingly negative way is in the tens or hundreds of millions.

One does not need to project out 50 or 100 years to see large differences in outcomes depending upon the choices we make. For an individual company, in five years the difference between handling change exceptionally well versus poorly could mean billions in wealth created or squandered, thousands of jobs created or lost, and dozens of products or services that are highly valued or irrelevant to tens of thousands or millions of customers. In less than five years, mistakes could close a big plant in a small town and cause havoc for everyone who lives there. Smart choices in one or two years could mean the difference between a managerial and frontline workforce that finds life wonderfully meaningful versus an agonizing source of constant stress that affects their health. And for the head of an organization, the right path over five years could mean retiring with a legacy to be deeply proud of for the rest of one's life. Or the opposite.

Beyond single organizations, our collective capacity and ability as a global village to deal with rapid, complex change will certainly be tested in the coming decades. Whether combating a changing climate, resolving the disruption of labor markets from changing technology and artificial intelligence, navigating financial crises, or rethinking how we work and live in the face of global pandemics and other public health threats, how we come to grips with even more change will have consequences that are very hard to conceive.

It does not always seem like it, but on average the lives of humans across the planet have been changing for the better for centuries now. Statistics on life expectancy, infant mortality, and violent deaths certainly bear this out. This book is meant to inspire people with the idea that by taking action in new ways, not only can we respond to rapid change but we can accelerate this rate of progress. We also hope that you will think about leadership differently: not as the responsibility of a few unique, charismatic individuals, but rather as a set of behaviors we can all exhibit in some ways.

In Chapter 1, we said our aspiration was that this book would inspire you to get-after-it. In conclusion, we sincerely, urgently, and passionately hope you do just that.