New research explains why so many leaders misjudge their own readiness for disruption, and what actually helps
Ask executives whether they're ready for the next major disruption, and most will say yes. Ask again once it actually hits, and the story often changes.
Insights, a U.K.-based learning and development firm, asked 880 senior HR and people leaders across 11 countries what they expected from their most recent major change effort, and what they actually got. Only 39% predicted moderate or major disruption. Fifty-one percent experienced it.
Eighty-seven percent of respondents said they weren't highly prepared for the change, and 41% of organizations needed more than three months to recover the productivity they lost. Forty-four percent of leaders didn't even realize their own behavior had turned negative during the disruption, and where it did, productivity fell more than twice as fast.
Disruption didn't always look the way leaders expected, either. The single biggest driver of change for these organizations wasn't a merger or a leadership shake-up. It was new technology.
Robert Hurley studies how leaders build, or lose, the trust of the people who work for them. He's a professor of leading people and organizations at the Gabelli School of Business at Fordham University in New York.
"We're not very good at anticipating major changes," Hurley said. "I think that's particularly true for HR executives because a lot of the HR function is making the system work in the present. There's a lot of problem solving, a lot of getting the organizational system to function effectively and process existing routines."
The present keeps crowding out the future
That daily grind leaves little room for the forward thinking leadership requires, Hurley said. Executives get pulled into keeping the system running today, and imagining a different tomorrow starts to feel like an unaffordable luxury.
"It's an act of discipline," Hurley said. "You have to have agency to force yourself to not fall into that trap [of staying consumed by the present] and to allocate some time to thinking about the future."
"I think good leaders do that," he added, "and so their calendars look different."
That discipline matters more now than it used to, because artificial intelligence has pushed organizations into an era of what Hurley calls "paradigmatic change." Falling behind in a moment like that carries real risk.
"You don't want to be on the bleeding edge sometimes of change," Hurley said, "but you don't want to be the last one either, because those companies sometimes go out of business."
Recent research backs up how widespread that risk has become. A Kearney survey covered by HRD found that workforce resistance puts AI transformation returns at risk, with more than 80% of executives saying fewer than half of their AI initiatives were delivering measurable financial impact. That lines up with McKinsey's research, which has found that roughly 70% of corporate transformations fail to hit their goals, a figure the firm has traced to teams that weren't ready for what change actually demanded of them.
American HR executives report similar strain. SHRM research has found that only 23% of HR executives are thriving amid today's pace of workplace change, even as the volume of change hitting most organizations has grown sharply in less than a decade.
Unprepared leaders lose more than time
There's another cost to falling behind, and it shows up in how much a team trusts the person leading it.
"If the followers on the team are smart, it erodes trust because if they're smart enough to know that the world is going to change and my leader isn't getting us ready for it, my leader is mired in the present or even worse, the past, and is not changing and innovating," Hurley said. "It would be good judgment to reduce trust in such a leader in an environment that is dynamic."
That finding echoes what Insights uncovered in its own research. Tricia Nelson, global marketing and sales director at Insights, said leaders often fall back on experience during multi-generational, high-pressure stretches of change. But she said in a statement that "assuming that experience trumps self-development has significant consequences for productivity."
A separate global report found that trust in leadership erodes amid widespread disruption, with outdated leadership habits shown to erode employee trust exactly when organizations most need people to stay engaged.
Testing readiness before change tests it for you
Hurley's advice for HR leaders watching a C-suite that seems overconfident about its own preparation: block off 20 minutes during a planning meeting to test whether the organization is really as ready as everyone assumes.
"You start a conversation and you challenge that," Hurley said. "You begin to probe very detailed consequences to the change plan."
If a company plans to bring AI into 20% of its underwriting operations, he said, someone needs concrete answers about how many people will be redeployed, who is let go, and how compensation and customer service change.
"Most people haven't really thought through that level of detail," he said, "because they haven't really done a great job of operationalizing change."
Hurley calls the underlying skill "deliberate learning," a systematic, evidence-based counterweight to the experience leaders naturally lean on. Companies that combine the two, he said, build what he calls dynamic capabilities: the organizational ability to change how they change.
That distinction shows up elsewhere in HR research, too. A previous HRD report found that leaders aren't ready for change, with only 13% of HR leaders describing their organization's leaders as highly capable of anticipating and reacting to change.
Even careful preparation doesn't guarantee success, Hurley said.
"There is no 100% because it's too complicated, and too involved," Hurley said. "If you're at 50/50, or 60% wins, 40% losses, you're pretty good."
