The Future of Leadership: How 2025 Shifted What Organisations Need From Their Executives

A Year That Changed the Questions Leaders Are Asking

As we close out 2025, one pattern has become impossible to ignore: the questions executive teams are asking about leadership are changing.

It is no longer, “How do we manage volatility?” It is increasingly, “How do we lead when the rules themselves keep changing?”

In our Annual C-Leader Report 2025, we listened closely to senior executives across sectors and combined their perspectives with global research from organisations such as the World Economic Forum, McKinsey, and Gartner. The message is clear: the leadership environment has shifted decisively from VUCA to BANI – and our leadership models must catch up.

From VUCA to BANI: The New Leadership Context

For more than a decade, organisations have used VUCA – volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity – to make sense of the world. It served us well as a way to frame turbulence.

But in 2025, executives consistently described something sharper, more fragile, and more emotionally demanding. The C-Leader Report adopts the BANI lens:

• Brittle – Systems look robust, but crack suddenly under pressure.

• Anxious – People and teams are operating close to emotional and cognitive saturation.

• Nonlinear – Small actions can trigger outsized consequences; cause and effect no longer move together in predictable ways.

• Incomprehensible – Some events and combinations of events simply do not fit our previous mental models.

This shift is not just semantic. It fundamentally changes what we ask of leaders.

VUCA rewarded resilience and adaptability. BANI demands anticipation, sensemaking, and deliberate human leadership.

What Executives Told Us in 2025

Across C-Leader conversations, a consistent set of tensions surfaced:

• Change fatigue is real – not only in front-line teams, but in senior leadership benches.

• Blind-spot bias is shaping decisions more than many leaders like to admit.

• Strategy cadence is often too slow for the pace of disruption.

• Technology adoption is outpacing the development of the people who must interpret, challenge, and apply it.

Executives spoke candidly about the risk of relying on what has worked before in a world where history is no longer a reliable guide. Many acknowledged that their organisations are still structured around linear planning, even as their operating environments behave in highly nonlinear ways.

The Global Data Is Unequivocal

The voices from the C-Leader tables are echoed in global research.

The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Reports show that employers expect roughly two-fifths of workers’ core skills to change by 2030, with significant skill instability concentrated around leadership, analytical thinking, and technology fluency.

McKinsey’s recent work on the future of organisations emphasises that leaders must develop their own adaptability and resilience while enabling it in others, or risk becoming a bottleneck in periods of disruption.

Gartner’s research highlights a similar pattern: the next evolution of leadership is “human leadership” – leaders who combine authenticity, empathy, and adaptiveness – yet only a small minority of employees say their leaders consistently show these behaviours.

Taken together, these perspectives reinforce what the C-Leader Report concludes: the leadership gap is less about knowledge and more about capability and behaviour.

A New Blueprint: The Futurist, the Strategist, and the Integrator

To navigate a BANI world, the C-Leader Report proposes a simple but powerful leadership blueprint built around three roles: Futurist, Strategist, and Integrator.

The Futurist: Seeing Beyond the Immediate

The Futurist role is about horizon scanning and weak-signal detection. In brittle systems, cracks appear long before they become visible failures.

Futurist leaders:

• Pay disciplined attention to emerging shifts, not only current performance.

• Look across sectors and geographies, not just within their own industry.

• Help their organisations ask, “What might we be underestimating?”

The Strategist: Designing for Nonlinear Reality

The Strategist role recognises that strategy can no longer be a static, five-year document.

Strategist leaders:

• Use scenario thinking and systems maps rather than single-point forecasts.

• Build strategies that can flex without losing coherence.

• Hold the tension between short-term performance and long-term positioning.

In a nonlinear world, they focus less on predicting the future and more on designing organisations that can pivot intelligently as it unfolds.

The Integrator: Stabilising the Human System

The Integrator role responds to anxiety, fragmentation, and fatigue.

Integrator leaders:

• Create psychological safety and clarity in environments of constant change.

• Pay attention to emotional climate, not just operational metrics.

• Connect people, purpose, and performance so that teams can think clearly under pressure.

In the words of one executive, “If our leaders cannot hold the anxiety, they will struggle to hold the strategy.”

The most effective C-Leaders we encountered in 2025 were not “either-or” leaders. They were Futurist, Strategist, and Integrator in different proportions depending on context.

Leadership Development: From Events to Ecosystems

A recurring conclusion in the C-Leader Report is that traditional leadership development models are no longer adequate.

Executives are calling for a shift:

• From once-off programmes → to continuous, embedded learning.

• From leadership as an individual journey → to leadership as an organisational system.

• From focusing only on technical competence → to nurturing cognitive agility, emotional intelligence, and sensemaking.

This aligns with SBI’s own practice: leadership development as a designed ecosystem that includes learning journeys, G_LABs (intentional reflection spaces), applied projects, coaching, and cross-industry dialogue – not just classroom time.

What 2026 Will Demand of Leaders

Looking ahead, the implications for executives and HR leaders are clear.

To lead effectively in 2026 and beyond, organisations will need leaders who can:

• Make sense of complexity rather than oversimplify it.

• Use AI as a provocateur, not a crutch – a tool to challenge thinking, not replace it.

• Hold the tension between speed and reflection in decision-making.

• Design cultures where curiosity, learning agility, and psychological safety are visibly valued.

• Anchor decisions in purpose and long-term value, not just quarterly performance.

The real competitive advantage is increasingly human, not technological.

Closing: Leading from a Future-Led Perspective

2025 has been a year of acceleration, exposure, and – for many leadership teams – honest self-assessment.

The organisations that thrive in the next cycle will not necessarily be those with the most advanced technology stacks or the most detailed strategies. They will be the ones who invest deliberately in anticipatory, human-centred leadership capacity.

2026 will reward leaders who think beyond the moment, see beyond the noise, and prepare beyond the obvious.In a BANI world, leadership is grounded in sensemaking, intentional adaptation, and the ability to move the organisation forward with future-led clarity.

At SBI, we are committed to moving beyond a business school.

We partner with organisations to build the leadership capability they need — now and for the future.