If you feel like you’re facing non-stop disruption, you’re not imagining it.
The 2024 Accenture Pulse of Change Index reported a staggering 183% increase in the rate of disruption over just four years. Tariffs are redrawing trade routes. AI is automating white-collar work once thought irreplaceable. Gen Z is rewriting the rules of engagement. And executives everywhere are realizing: 2025 might be the slowest year of the rest of our lives.
This isn’t just a flurry of change.
It’s a permanent climate shift.
And yet, too many organizations still pretend they can ride out the storm, survive until things “stabilize,” and then get back to normal. That assumption is no longer just outdated — it’s dangerous.
It’s time to stop treating change like a project.
Disruption Isn’t New. But It Is Permanent.
The COVID-19 pandemic shattered any lingering illusion of stability. Millions lost jobs. Entire industries collapsed. Remote work, once niche, became the norm. But even before the virus hit, our world was already on unstable ground.
Since 1988, the world has experienced over 469 country-level recessions — roughly one every 25 days. Beyond economic shocks, the World Economic Forum’s Global Risk Reports have consistently ranked interconnected threats — pandemics, climate events, cyberattacks, social unrest — as top business concerns.
We didn’t need a pandemic to prove the point. But it sure drove it home.
Why Most Leadership Playbooks Are Outdated
Modern management theory was built for a different era — the post-war economic boom of the mid-20th century. Tools like Porter’s Deliberate School of Strategy, Just-in-Time Supply Chain Management, and traditional budgeting were designed for a world of relative stability.
They all relied on a core assumption: that you could plan for the long term, optimize for efficiency, and extract value from a working model for decades.
That world no longer exists.
In 1958, the average lifespan of an S&P 500 company was 61 years, according to Yale researcher Richard Foster. Today, companies are collapsing — or reinventing — at unprecedented speed.
According to the 2024 Global Reinvention Survey we conduct at the Reinvention Academy every two years, nearly 1 in 5 organizations (19.4%) report they must reinvent every year or faster to stay competitive — up from 13.7% in 2018. Another 33.3% report a reinvention cycle of every 2–3 years.
This is no longer about change management.
It’s about business survival, growth, and talent retention in a world where no advantage lasts long.
Reinvention Must Be the Default Setting
When disruption is continuous, you can’t wait for things to “calm down” before you adapt. You need systems that make adaptation continuous.
Take Miro, the virtual collaboration platform. Before COVID-19, it was a niche tool with 3.5 million users. By mid-2020, as remote work exploded, it had added 1.5 million users and over 21,000 paying customers, including Salesforce, Dell, PwC, and Electronic Arts.
That success wasn’t luck. It was years of strategic reinvention:
• Anticipating remote collaboration trends
• Building an infinitely customizable product
• Rebranding and repositioning before the pandemic to scale global reach
As CEO Andrey Khusid put it, “Our product gained traction among people who usually relied on physical whiteboards but had to collaborate with people in different locations.”
Miro’s adaptability — not rigidity — became its edge.
Change Can’t Be Managed Like Snow in the Desert
If it snows once every 50 years, you plow the roads and wait for it to melt. But if it snows every month, you build snow‑plows into the budget — or launch a ski resort.
Change is snowing constantly. Most companies are still trying to shovel.
This isn’t just a poetic image — it’s a warning based on what I outlined earlier in my Forbes piece, Surviving Uncertainty: 5 Strategies To Stay Sane, Sharp And Financially Sound. In a world where disruption is the norm, traditional coping mechanisms (cutting costs, freezing hiring, treating change as a one‑off emergency) don’t build resilience — they burn it out.
What companies need instead is a built‑in reinvention system: a set of tools, habits, and organizational muscle memory that converts volatility from a threat into an opportunity.
Treat reinvention not as a last‑minute shove, but as part of your monthly (or quarterly) operating rhythm — like snowplows ready before the first flake falls. That way, when disruption hits — whether AI, tariffs, or generational shifts — you’re not reacting. You’re already structurally prepared.
Your Playbook Needs a System, Not a Sprint
The question is no longer, “How do we survive until things stabilize?”
It’s: “What system are you using to thrive in chaos?”
Top-performing organizations don’t survive disruption by accident. They:
• Treat change as a core business capability
• Invest in reinvention infrastructure — not just crisis response
• Align leadership, culture, and incentives for adaptability
And critically: they don’t wait for disruption to knock.
They invite it.
The Bottom Line
The challenge we face isn’t about weathering the current storm.
It’s about learning to live — and lead — in the storm.
Reinvention is not a one-time transformation.
It is an ongoing operating system.
It’s time to install yours.