Leading Right Now Might Feel Complex. But Here Is What Is (Also) Really Happening.

The leaders running organisations right now (roughly older Gen X and younger Boomers) are operating under a specific kind of pressure that doesn’t get named correctly. It’s described as complexity. And yes, of course, it is. But the complexity is the solvable piece — put skill A against problem D, assign team 47 to Project Hades. What strong executive teams need most right now is the capacity to manage people, hold emotional resilience, and withstand the compromise of it all.

Today’s leaders may carry the weight of this moment harder. And better.

The leaders who started their careers in the mid to late 1980s had a solid stretch of more analog days. Communication by press release, post, and FedEx as the fastest document delivery. Time for emotions to settle — public sentiment, corporate actors, the market itself. They built a baseline in their early careers and have spent decades learning how to return to it.

The crystallized intelligence that takes decades to develop is a relational and emotional one. But intelligence needs a goal: even emotional intelligence needs to know what it’s aiming for. And part of what experience teaches is what an unavoidable, unpleasant, correct compromise actually feels like. There are no perfect answers. There will be blowback. I will survive it. That is different from a leader who doesn’t yet know what that specific unease should feel like — who can’t distinguish it from a healthy instinct that something is genuinely wrong. Both responses are instinctive. Both are experiential. But one is informed and one will flail. And in the flailing, things start to get called complex when really they are testing capacity.

Today’s leaders are the last generation to benefit from the emotional pace of analog.

Robert David and I wrote about the difference between fluid intelligence — the ability to learn new systems quickly, process novel information, adapt fast — and crystallized intelligence, which is reasoning built from accumulated experience. Fluid intelligence peaks early. Crystallized intelligence doesn’t plateau… it grows.

That evolution in the brain from one kind of intelligence to another isn’t generation specific, obviously. But the advantage that will disappear with current leadership is an anchor back to a pre-digitalised time — a pace where you could take time to read the room, to hear subtext, to simply become more fluent in human emotions. That is how you learn to manage people. That is how you tie company strategy, hard decisions and real world impact (how will this land with people: shareholders, customers, employees). The room was smaller and exclusive. The voices that were heard looked a lot alike. And the cost of that now would be catastrophic. This isn’t mourning the loss. It is simply recognising that current leaders can lean into something that the next generation of leaders and all who follow will have to more consciously learn. Or put another way, it is the responsibility of current leaders to help the next ones recognise the emotional capacity required to handle this pace — and yes, complexity — of the markets.

The job of a true leader is not unlike a flight attendant during bad turbulence. Stay calm, look calm — you are signalling to everyone else whether to panic. But that calm isn’t manufactured (I hope — I fly from London to San Francisco next week.). It is experienced. The systems are built. The people are trained. Passengers won’t like it but they also won’t stop flying. And very, very rarely does the worst possible outcome happen. Weather is weather. And there are more rainstorms than monsoons. Our geopolitical environment, like our real one, is having more extreme events in rapid succession lately. But the goal of those in charge is to have the experience and emotional resilience to weather it (sorry, had to).

For strong leaders, unease is not the alarm. It’s proof the baseline is still intact.

The risk for this generation isn’t inexperience. It’s overcorrection. Leaders who feel the pace pressure, the ones who worry about appearing slow or behind, are more likely to perform decisiveness. Certainty as a signal of capability is not illogical. But recognising unease as the cost of compromise and not a distress signal is actual capability, too. It’s less clear. It feels worse. It is farther from that emotional baseline when ‘sleep on it’ was a thing and fast was a fax.

And understanding all that, and accepting that ‘feeling good’ about something is not the same as doing the best thing feasible requires a learned blend of emotion regulation and experiential instinct. That’s the job.