In the late 1990s I was working at EMI when Napster arrived.
I remember the atmosphere in those early months quite clearly. There was a mixture of curiosity, dismissiveness and then, quite suddenly, genuine alarm. The music industry had survived format changes before. Vinyl to cassette. Cassette to CD. Each time, the fundamentals of the business held. You made music, you sold a physical product, you collected the margin.
Napster didn’t change the format. It changed the entire logic of the business. And what made it so destabilising wasn’t just the technology itself. It was the speed, the uncertainty, and the sense that decisions being made in boardrooms bore almost no relationship to what was actually happening in the world outside them.
What I didn’t fully appreciate at the time was that this was still, by today’s standards, a relatively contained disruption. One technology. One industry. A few years to play out.
What leaders are navigating now is categorically different.
When disruptions stop arriving one at a time
Artificial intelligence, automation, regulatory upheaval, geopolitical instability, supply chain volatility, shifting customer expectations. These aren’t sequential challenges that organisations can address and then consolidate around before the next one arrives. They’re simultaneous, and they amplify each other in ways that make the combined effect far more complex than any single one would be in isolation.
Mustafa Suleyman captures this well in The Coming Wave. The argument isn’t simply that powerful technologies are arriving. It’s that they’re arriving together, compressing the time available to adapt and raising the stakes for getting the response wrong.
For leaders, this changes the nature of the problem fundamentally. Because most of the change models, governance structures and programme methodologies that organisations rely on were designed for a different environment. One where disruption was episodic. Where you could run a transformation, consolidate, and then prepare for the next one.
That breathing space no longer exists. And organisations that are still operating as though it does are absorbing enormous hidden costs.
The instinctive response that makes things worse
When the pace of change increases, there is a predictable pattern in how most organisations respond. More initiatives are launched. Timelines are compressed. Performance pressure increases. Reporting layers multiply. Governance intensifies.
On the surface, this looks like decisive leadership. In practice, it tends to produce the opposite of what’s intended.
Teams that are already navigating significant uncertainty don’t become more effective under additional pressure. They become more exhausted. Leaders who are pulled across too many simultaneous priorities don’t execute with more focus. They execute with less. Strategic initiatives that overlap and compete for the same finite pool of human attention don’t collectively accelerate. They collectively stall.
The problem, in most cases, isn’t effort. Organisations going through compounding change are frequently working extremely hard. The problem is that effort without adaptability is not a sustainable strategy. It’s a path toward the kind of change fatigue that can take years to recover from, and that quietly destroys the engagement and trust that future transformation depends on.
What adaptability actually means
Organisational adaptability is a term that gets used loosely, so it’s worth being precise about what it means in practice.
It isn’t about reacting faster. Accelerating the pace of response in an environment that is already moving too fast for most organisations to absorb tends to compound the problem rather than resolve it.
Genuine adaptability is about building the capacity to absorb disruption without destabilising. To reallocate focus and resource when circumstances change without triggering chaos. To learn from what’s happening quickly enough to adjust course before small problems become large ones. And critically, to do all of this in a way that maintains rather than erodes the engagement and energy of the people doing the work.
This requires intentional design. Not more control, not more urgency, but a deliberate approach to how priorities are set, how friction is reduced, how psychological safety is maintained, and how strategy and execution are kept in genuine alignment rather than theoretical alignment.
The question worth sitting with
The leaders who navigate compounding change most effectively tend to ask a different question to their peers. Not “how do we move faster?” but “how do we build an organisation that can sustain momentum through uncertainty without burning out the people we depend on?”
Those are not the same question, and they lead to very different decisions.
At EMI, the organisations that ultimately adapted best to digital disruption weren’t necessarily the ones that moved fastest in the early years. They were the ones that figured out how to maintain clarity of purpose and genuine engagement while everything around them was shifting. The ones that treated adaptability as a capability to be built, not a gear to be changed.
The environment most leaders are operating in now makes that lesson more relevant, and more urgent, than it has ever been.
The pace isn’t slowing. The organisations that will navigate this well are the ones that stop trying to outrun it, and start building the capacity to move with it instead.
Compounding change refers to multiple significant disruptions arriving simultaneously rather than sequentially. Artificial intelligence, automation, regulatory shifts, geopolitical instability and changing customer expectations are all landing at once, amplifying each other in ways that make the combined effect far more complex than any single challenge would be in isolation. Traditional change models were designed for episodic disruption. They struggle in an environment where that breathing space between transformations no longer exists.
When the pace of change increases, the instinctive leadership response is to launch more initiatives, compress timelines and intensify governance. In practice this tends to produce exhaustion rather than acceleration. Teams navigating significant uncertainty don’t become more effective under additional pressure. Strategic initiatives that compete for the same finite pool of human attention collectively stall rather than collectively accelerate.
Genuine adaptability isn’t about reacting faster. It’s about building the capacity to absorb disruption without destabilising, reallocate focus without creating chaos, and maintain the engagement and energy of people throughout periods of sustained uncertainty. It requires intentional design: clear prioritisation, reduced friction, strong psychological safety, and genuine alignment between strategy and execution.
The leaders who sustain momentum most effectively stop asking how to move faster and start asking how to build an organisation that can move consistently without burning out the people it depends on. That means treating adaptability as a capability to be deliberately built over time, not a response to be improvised under pressure.
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