Leadership has seldom been harder. Survey after survey tells us that chief executives feel unprepared for a fast-moving and more unpredictable future. What seems a perfect storm of risk is building, including geopolitical conflict and climate instability; tech disruption from artificial intelligence; fragile supply chains, to name a few. Another risk factor that is perhaps most often overlooked is polarised societies.
That list forms part of a 2025 report from consultancy McKinsey and the World Economic Forum, in which 84 per cent of the 260 business leaders surveyed reported feeling “underprepared for current trends and uncertainties”. The clustering of all of these disruptive forces is perhaps a first for business, and one that demands decisive action. But how?
Leaders are well aware of the idea of a perfect storm. But humans also have a well-documented tendency to look away, dubbed the “ostrich effect” in a 2009 academic paper in the Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, by Niklas Karlsson, George Loewenstein and Duane Seppi. News avoidance is another symptom: globally, four in ten adults say they sometimes or often avoid the news because they feel overwhelmed or gloomy, according to the latest Reuters Institute Digital News Report. That is up from 29 per cent in 2017.
