“The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones.”
— John Maynard Keynes
There is a particular kind of frustration many leaders recognise today. Strategic processes are followed diligently, analyses are robust, and decisions are defensible by conventional standards. Yet outcomes often remain volatile, fragile, or unexpectedly disappointing. What feels new is not uncertainty itself — uncertainty has always accompanied strategy — but the growing sense that familiar frameworks no longer explain why things unfold the way they do.
Why do strategies that once worked reliably now feel brittle?
Why does the accumulation of data fail to translate into clearer foresight?
And why does experience, instead of stabilising outcomes, sometimes appear to lose its predictive power?
These questions are rarely articulated explicitly, but they linger beneath many contemporary strategic discussions.
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Most explanations focus on visible change. Markets move faster, technologies interact in unpredictable ways, and organisations are embedded in dense global networks. All of this is true, but it does not fully account for the unease leaders experience. The deeper problem is not simply that the environment has become more complex, but that the logic through which it is interpreted no longer provides sufficient orientation.
This is where the idea of a paradigm shift becomes useful — provided it is taken seriously. A paradigm is not a trend, a tool, or a fashionable concept. It is the underlying structure of assumptions that defines what is considered rational, which problems appear relevant, and which solutions seem plausible. Paradigms operate quietly in the background. They attract little attention while they function well, and become visible only when they lose explanatory power.
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For a long time, strategic thinking rested on a relatively stable worldview. Markets were assumed to be broadly predictable, causality sufficiently linear to be analysed and optimised, and complex systems decomposable into manageable parts. With enough information and analytical sophistication, uncertainty could be reduced to acceptable levels. This worldview was not misguided. It reflected the structural conditions of its time and enabled remarkable organisational achievements.
Paradigms do not fail because they were wrong.
They fail because the conditions that sustained them no longer prevail.
Today, many of the assumptions that once supported traditional strategic logic have become unreliable. Causal relationships increasingly operate through feedback loops rather than linear chains. Local decisions propagate across global systems in delayed and disproportionate ways. Optimisation in one area often creates vulnerability in another. More data does not necessarily lead to better foresight, and more refined models do not guarantee more reliable outcomes.
When prediction weakens, planning loses its privileged status.
Strategy begins to explain less than it promises.
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This does not mean that strategy has become obsolete. It means that its role has changed. Strategy is no longer primarily about producing a definitive plan; it has become a continuous process of interpretation and orientation. The emphasis shifts from control to adaptability, from optimisation to resilience, and from prediction to sense-making.
At this point, the question becomes unavoidable:
What does this mean for how we actually think and decide?
First, it requires a different relationship with uncertainty. Waiting for clarity can no longer be assumed to be prudent. Acting with incomplete information is not a failure of preparation; it has become a structural condition of strategic decision-making.
Second, it shifts attention from answers to assumptions. When outcomes disappoint, the instinct is often to refine execution or gather more data. Under conditions of paradigm shift, a more productive move is to ask which assumptions quietly shaped the decision in the first place. This habit alone can significantly improve judgement.
Third, it alters what leadership feels like. If leadership once derived confidence from control and predictability, it now demands attentiveness, responsibility, and the capacity to revise one’s thinking without interpreting revision as failure. Strategic maturity increasingly lies in holding ambiguity without rushing to premature closure.
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Finally, it invites a different reading of friction. The tension between plans and outcomes, between effort and impact, is not merely a problem to be eliminated. It is often the first signal that the underlying logic needs to be reconsidered. Learning to recognise this signal — rather than suppress it — is one of the most valuable strategic skills available today.
Strategy remains essential, but no longer as a promise of certainty. It becomes a disciplined practice of orientation — a way of navigating complexity without pretending to eliminate it.
The greatest risk in times of paradigm shift is not that the world is changing, but that we continue to act as if the logic through which we understand it has remained unchanged.