Posted on: 13/11/2025

Thought Leadership

Matthew Hotten explores how leadership must evolve in an era where change is constant and unpredictable. Traditional step-by-step frameworks no longer fit a world shaped by disruption and the pace of BANI. Leaders must shift from managing change to leading through it—embracing ambiguity, fostering adaptability, and supporting teams in real time. Emotional intelligence, sensemaking and trust are now core tools. For organisations, the challenge is to build cultures that thrive amid uncertainty, where adaptability is a way of working. In today’s world, change isn’t managed—it’s lived.

By Matthew Hotten, Senior Consultant Organisational Development, Leadership and Learning at West Midlands Employers

For most of our careers, change was something we could plan. We managed it through programmes, projects, and carefully controlled communications. Change had structure. It had milestones, risk logs, and sponsors.

That world is fading fast.

The models many of us grew up with—Kübler-Ross’s Change Curve, Kotter’s step-by-step framework, Lewin’s “unfreeze–change–refreeze”—gave us comfort through order. They implied that if we followed the right process, we could guide people neatly from A to B. And for a time, that was largely true.

Change was big, infrequent, and often technical. A new IT system, a restructure, a new policy framework. We prepared, we trained, we implemented. Change was a noun—an event with a beginning and an end.

Today, it’s something else entirely.

Change has become emergent. It’s no longer something we initiate; it’s something we respond to—constantly. It appears in short bursts, through digital disruption, social pressure, new data, and shifting expectations. It moves through organisations like weather, not machinery.

The shift from planned to emergent change has profound implications for leadership. Traditional models assume a degree of control that no longer exists. They belong to an era when the world moved at a manageable pace. Now, the variables multiply daily. Systems interact in ways we can’t predict. A policy change in one department can ripple through ten others before the week is out.

The world has moved from what the military once described as VUCA—volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous—to something even sharper: BANI—brittle, anxious, non-linear, and incomprehensible. In this world, our organisations can appear stable right up until the moment they’re not. Pressure builds invisibly, confidence frays quickly, and events don’t unfold in straight lines.

This demands a different kind of leadership.

It’s no longer enough to manage change; we have to lead through it. That means being comfortable with ambiguity, cultivating emotional intelligence, and creating environments where people can adapt in real time. The focus shifts from delivering a fixed end-state to building organisational capacity for ongoing adaptation.

That doesn’t make the old models irrelevant. They still tell us something vital about the human experience of change. The emotions that underpin the Kübler-Ross curve—denial, anger, bargaining, sadness, acceptance—remain deeply relevant. But we need to stop treating them as a linear journey. People don’t move neatly from one stage to another. They loop, stall, and rebound. You can see it in your own teams: one person ready to move forward, another clinging to the old ways, both perfectly rational in their context.

The challenge is to discern what still serves us. The old frameworks were built for a world that stayed still long enough to map. They gave us scaffolding when the climb was predictable. Yet when we reach instinctively for Lewin or Kotter, are we seeking genuine insight—or simply comfort in their familiarity? If today’s world refuses to “refreeze,” what part of those older models still helps us lead rather than manage? Perhaps their true value now lies not in their steps or stages, but in their spirit—the belief that people need meaning, not just process. Maybe it’s time to keep the empathy and let go of the illusion of control.

The emotional reality of change hasn’t changed. What’s different is the pace and persistence of it. There’s less recovery time between waves. As leaders, our job is to acknowledge that turbulence, not mask it with false certainty.

Modern leadership is less about control and more about sensemaking—helping people interpret what’s happening around them and find their footing amid flux. It’s about creating psychological safety, harnessing collective intelligence, and being open to learning as we go. In practical terms, that means less reliance on multi-year transformation plans and more emphasis on iterative learning. It means empowering decision-making closer to the front line, where insights emerge fastest. It means leading with transparency and humility—qualities that build trust when everything else feels unstable.

The paradox is that as the world becomes more complex, the fundamentals of leadership become simpler. Be honest. Listen well. Create clarity where you can, and hold uncertainty where you can’t. Model adaptability, not invulnerability. Change has changed—and so must our response to it. The challenge for senior leaders isn’t to master every new framework. It’s to build cultures that can thrive when the frameworks no longer fit.

Because the truth is, we’re not managing change anymore. We’re living in it.