Leading through structural volatility
Business has entered a fundamentally different era. AI has accelerated the pace and scale of disruption, while lowering the cost and complexity of starting and scaling new businesses. Competitive advantages are becoming more temporary, leaving established organizations with less time than ever to recognize change and respond.
Speakers agreed that today's disruption differs from previous cycles in both speed and scale. Rather than facing a single transformative force, organizations are confronting multiple structural shifts simultaneously.
Building on decades of Innosight's work in disruptive innovation, Andy Waldeck, Managing Partner, Innosight, set the stage with the observation that while every generation experiences disruption, this one is different. The pace and scale of AI are fundamentally reshaping industries and changing the economics of competition. The challenge for leaders is building organizations that can adapt as quickly as the world around them is changing.
Patrick Viguerie, Managing Director, Innosight, whose research has long focused on long-term business trends and corporate performance, placed these changes in a broader business context. Rather than confronting a single disruptive force, organizations are now navigating multiple structural shifts simultaneously—from AI and demographics to energy, geopolitics, and inflation. Today, those tailwinds are giving way to a far more volatile environment.
“It feels like a turning point,” said Viguerie. “The only question is the scale and power of the next wave.”
Participants expressed both optimism and realism. They see tremendous potential for AI to improve productivity while acknowledging the difficult transition ahead. Geopolitical uncertainty, uneven economic conditions, workforce disruption, and the challenge of implementation are compounding the complexity organizations must navigate.
Organizations can no longer plan for a single future. Success will depend on building the capacity to adapt as disruption continues to accelerate.
“The transition will be difficult over the next five years,” one participant observed. “We're going to be in a completely different world because of AI.”
Why successful companies struggle to respond to disruption
Throughout the summit, speakers returned to a common question: Why do successful organizations struggle to respond to disruption?
Their answer challenged conventional thinking. As disruption accelerates, organizational complexity increasingly limits an organization's ability to adapt. The discussion suggested that one of today's defining leadership challenges is building organizations capable of responding as quickly as the environment around them is changing.
1. Complexity has become a strategic challenge.
Andrei Perumal, Managing Director, Innosight, whose work has focused on helping organizations identify and reduce unnecessary complexity, defined complexity as a systemic issue that spans products, processes, organizations, markets, and regulation. It is often created by people making reasonable decisions but in isolation from one another across an organization.
Tackling this problem requires distinguishing between good complexity that truly creates value and bad complexity that adds cost, operational risk, and grows disproportionately as organizations expand, Perumal said.
Stephen Wilson, Managing Director, Innosight, whose work focuses on strategy and operational transformation, argued that complexity and disruption are not separate challenges. Instead, they create a reinforcing cycle that leaves organizations increasingly vulnerable to change.
“Complexity makes companies more vulnerable to disruption,” said Wilson. “Disruption often causes companies to add even more complexity.”
Complexity narrows organizational focus, slows decision-making, obscures value drivers, and turns companies inward, Wilson explained. By reducing bad complexity, he argued, companies can improve the signal-to-noise ratio and free financial and human resources for investment in growth.
2. Organizations struggle to respond to disruption because complexity limits adaptability.
Waldeck and Ned Calder, Managing Director, Innosight, both returned to a question that has shaped Innosight's work since late co-founder Clay Christensen first introduced the theory of disruptive innovation: Why do successful companies struggle to respond to change?
Waldeck argued that organizational complexity often prevents companies from pursuing new sources of growth, even when leaders recognize the opportunity. Conversely, disruptors often learn faster because they carry less complexity.
“Why is it hard for great companies to stay great over time?”" said Waldeck. “The rigidity, the complexity that builds up makes it hard for them to change.”
Disruption unfolds as a process rather than a single event, said Calder. It often begins with an enabling technology like AI that removes constraints, creating opportunities for new business models or new ways of delivering value. That makes disruption difficult to recognize in its early stages, particularly for established organizations focused on serving existing customers and improving today's business.
The paradox is that companies rarely struggle because they are poorly managed, he said. The same behaviors that make organizations successful can also make it more difficult to recognize and respond to disruptive change.
“The challenge isn't whether disruption is coming for your industry. It is coming,” said Calder. “The question is whether you'll see it clearly enough, early enough, to do something about it.”
3. AI is accelerating both the pace of disruption and the opportunity to respond.
AI emerged throughout the summit as a force changing the economics of competition. Rather than simply making incumbent organizations more productive, AI is lowering the cost and complexity of starting and scaling new businesses, forcing established companies to compete in an environment where long-standing competitive advantages are becoming less durable.
“AI doesn't just collapse moats for incumbents,” said Calder. “It dramatically lowers the cost and complexity of starting and scaling a disruptive company.”
The discussion also challenged how leaders evaluate AI. Waldeck argued that organizations should begin with three questions: Where are we trying to go? What are we trying to accomplish? And how will we measure success? Improving today's business is fundamentally different from building the business of tomorrow, and the two require different measures of success.
Near-term ROI may be appropriate for productivity improvements, but it can be the wrong measure for investments intended to create new businesses. Ultimately, he argued, the issue is one of resource allocation.
“Think about AI as a way not to make today's business better,” said Waldeck. “Think about AI as a way to make the business of tomorrow better.”
Future-back thinking provides that destination, allowing organizations to judge whether AI initiatives are contributing to long-term strategic learning, he said.
The discussion ultimately returned to organizational learning. AI can lower the barriers to innovation and accelerate disruption, but competitive advantage will depend on how quickly organizations learn and adapt. Complexity remains the limiting factor.
“AI can help simplify,” said Wilson. "It can also accelerate complexity.”
Building the capacity to compete
Throughout the summit, speakers explored what organizations must do to strengthen their ability to respond to accelerating disruption. While they approached the challenge from different perspectives, three common themes emerged.
1. Tackling complexity requires leadership and culture.
Despite the excitement surrounding AI, leadership remains the critical differentiator. While AI can surface insights, identify opportunities, and generate options, leaders still have to set direction, make difficult choices, build accountability, and mobilize people to act.
As Rob Bell, Managing Director, Innosight, noted, AI's greatest challenge isn't capability—it's implementation.
The summit conversations also highlighted how accountability often narrows as complexity grows, making it difficult to address issues that cut across functions or business units. Organizations need cultures where accountability becomes automatic and leaders simplify, prioritize, and act collectively
“AI can identify opportunities and suggest actions, but implementation requires people, leadership, and followership," said one participant. "AI can't say, 'Follow me.’”
2. Build the capacity to respond to disruption.
Organizations need to move beyond reacting to disruption by building a “continuous adaptive cycle” of observing, orienting, deciding, and acting, said Bell. That means continually monitoring weak signals, developing scenarios, highlighting uncomfortable truths, and translating those insights into deliberate choices about where to compete and where to place bold bets.
In the summit’s final discussion, Bell urged leaders to better understand their ecosystems, citing John Deere's evolution from an equipment manufacturer to a service provider as an example of confronting uncomfortable truths and redefining where to compete.
“The organizations that have navigated disruption best built systematic processes to challenge their own business models before someone else did,” said Bell. “Not as a one-time exercise. As an ongoing organizational habit.”
3. Use AI to expand strategic possibilities.
The discussions also moved beyond viewing AI primarily as a productivity tool. AI can help organizations better understand markets, explore new opportunities, lower the cost of experimentation, and reshape the strategy process itself. As the cost of simulation continues to fall, organizations can test ideas, challenge assumptions, and even identify ways to disrupt their own businesses before competitors do.
At the same time, AI cannot replace leadership or judgment. Organizations also risk limiting AI's value if they use it simply to replicate existing strategy processes rather than challenge assumptions and identify genuinely disruptive opportunities.
“Through AI, we can make more capacity available, but that increased resource could be wasted if we don't focus our efforts correctly,” said one participant.
Throughout the summit, one message emerged consistently: organizations cannot eliminate complexity or disruption, but they can strengthen their ability to manage these forces and better respond to opportunities. Companies that remove unnecessary complexity and build the capacity to adapt will be better positioned to create enduring growth.
The 2026 Complexity Summit reinforced the value of bringing together senior leaders to examine the forces reshaping business and to exchange practical ideas for navigating them. As complexity continues to grow and disruption accelerates, those conversations—and the willingness to challenge assumptions and rethink long-held approaches—will only become more important.
About Innosight and WP&C
We’re the strategy and operations capability of Huron, a global leader in operational and digital transformation.
We partner with senior leaders to address their most complex strategic challenges. We help build resilience in today’s business while shaping the organization of tomorrow.
Over 25 years, we’ve worked with senior leaders across a range of industries, with special focus on industrials, health care, life sciences, and consumer goods.
In 2025, Huron acquired Wilson Perumal & Company, expanding Innosight's capabilities in strategy execution, complexity reduction, and operational transformation. Together, we help organizations meet the moment and own the future.
