The 21st century has been shaped more by shocks than by the planned progress we once imagined. This is the first in an ongoing exploration of how business, technology, and society are changing in ways our traditional frameworks struggle to capture.
How we imagine the future shapes how we think about business. When societies think in moonshots, firms think in audacious goals. When our understanding of the future changes, so must our approach to growth.
The 20th-century imagination was filled with visions of progress—flying cars, the end of disease, domestic robots, abundant leisure. But those dreams never materialized. Instead, the 21st century has been shaped by shocks rather than moonshots. Nostalgia for an era when the Western world could “put a man on the moon” has given way to uncertainty about what progress even looks like.
The forces shaping today’s world do not follow the linear paths of progress we once imagined. Financial crises, pandemics, extreme climate events, political polarization, and technology acceleration now drive change more than deliberate planning. In this new “Age of Shock,” traditional strategic planning—built around envisioning, organizing, and marshalling resources toward fixed goals—will increasingly fall short.
Succeeding in today’s interconnected world requires a shift from controlling change to navigating and adapting to it. Without acknowledging the uncertainty of transformational forces like AI or climate change, firms will fail to ask the open-ended questions that unlock new markets and growth. Those that remain siloed cannot see how today’s shocks ripple across domains, leaving them vulnerable. Today’s challenge is learning how to grow when the path forward is unknown.
Growth in the Age of Shock means moving beyond plan-and-execute strategies and embracing opportunism and entrepreneurialism. Traditional planning is limiting, weighed down by practices that assume a linear path forward. Instead, firms must recognize shock as an opening for value creation—and act on it. Shocks loosen the grip of existing structures, reorder norms and values, and create futures shaped by adaptation rather than past predictions.
The pandemic triggered a global reshuffling of where and how work gets done. Polarization has redefined the boundaries of what is politically and economically possible across nation-states worldwide. Artificial intelligence is dismantling the divide between knowledge work and automation, with consequences we have yet to fully grasp. In this environment, organizations that seize the moment and act without a playbook will outperform those relying on traditional strategic planning.
If this view of the 21st century holds—as the growing success of opportunistic, entrepreneurial actors and the repeated failure of rigid long-term planning suggests—then companies and boards need to reassess their approach to growth. They will need new expertise, a different approach to uncertainty, and leadership that embraces plural perspectives.
New Expertise for a New Era
Recommendation #1: Integrate non-traditional expertise into core business functions.
Firms should start by bringing in the missing expertise needed to make sense of and act upon the 21st century. Measuring what they can control is no longer enough—they must develop insight into external forces beyond their control. Leading financial institutions now hire climate scientists and geopolitical analysts, recognizing that market success depends on understanding non-market forces. The rising demand for cross-domain sensemaking reflects this shift in thinking.
To be effective, this new expertise must be fully integrated into how companies assess and serve customers and markets. The functional separation that defines many firms today—for example, policy on the periphery, product and sales at the core—creates blind spots in a shock-driven world. When AI ethicists help shape product decisions or geopolitical analysts inform market entry strategies, organizations gain the ability to navigate complex terrain.
Boards should assess management’s grasp of the knowledge gaps they need to fill and their readiness to break down silos that prevent interdisciplinary expertise from shaping business strategy. The history of digital transformation—and the challenges firms faced in attracting and integrating digital leaders—offers a preview of what’s ahead. Today’s task is even greater, as much of the expertise firms now need lies beyond traditional business domains, in areas like climate science, energy transitions, demographics, and emerging fields such as AI ethics and digital trust.
Reimagining Uncertainty as Opportunity
Recommendation #2: Transform managing uncertainty from downside mitigation to opportunity creation.
Organizations retooling for growth in the Age of Shock must approach uncertainty differently. Unplanned change naturally puts firms in a defensive, reactionary posture. The instinct is to assess and contain uncertainty as if it were quantifiable risk, which works when shocks are rare, the intervals between them long, and their impact contained. But in the 21st century, we face not just risk but uncertainty—where shocks are frequent, consequences unpredictable, and traditional models inadequate.
When unplanned change is no longer an interruption of the business cycle but a regular feature of it, firms that treat uncertainty as a constraint will be constrained by it. Instead of reacting defensively, they must develop the internal conditions for agility, experimentation, and rapid execution when openings emerge.
Adaptive firms will delegate more decision-making to opportunistic, entrepreneurial teams that recognize and act on emerging opportunities. They learn to embrace ambiguity and operate without a playbook, equipping leaders and talent with the capabilities and culture needed to do both. These teams have proven successful in high-pressure military environments, where devolving authority to those closest to the action often outperforms traditional planning. Their decentralized decision making, rapid adaptability, free-flow of information, and bias toward action are qualities businesses can adopt in today’s increasingly unpredictable environment.
Boards should interrogate not just how management mitigates downsides—such as jobs lost to AI—but how they will create value in uncertain times. What new customer needs are emerging? What markets are being created? What unconventional partnerships should we pursue? A proactive stance toward uncertainty sees the reordering of norms and values as openings for growth that reactive firms will miss.
Leading in a World of Many Futures
Recommendation #3: Build leadership teams for a world of multiple, distinct market futures.
One key reason the 21st century differs from Western expectations is the arrival of alternative visions of the future. China’s transformation into an economic powerhouse and India’s digital identity initiatives have created development paths that don’t follow Western models. Social commerce, digital public goods, and transportation networks from Asia now shape global practices, while emerging market approaches to technology adoption often leapfrog Western patterns entirely.
The 21st century now reflects a broader imagination, where lingering Western visions share the stage with the economic and technological ambitions of larger populations and capable states. The ability of these populations and states to reroute or constrain paths to the future is itself a shock—to Western labor markets, business growth, and technological supremacy.
This plurality of futures calls for new leadership approaches. Western companies have discovered that success in non-Western markets comes from recognizing them as distinct ecosystems with their own rules, rather than as extensions of home markets. As products and services can no longer be built once and exported everywhere, management teams need experience across multiple systems. A background exclusively in a single, dominant market becomes a constraint rather than an advantage.
Too many firms still assign regional rather than global scope to non-Western market leaders. It is rare for insights from outside the home country to shape and drive global strategy. Few companies recruit global functional leaders from beyond the home market—even in fields where non-Western approaches excel, such as mobile commerce, digital payments, social media, travel, and hospitality.
Even within traditional home markets, plurality is increasingly evident. The rural-urban divide in many Western nations has created distinct economic, cultural, and political ecosystems that function according to different rules and values. As a result, for many companies, home is no longer a singular but plural market. Boards should assess whether management is adapting to plural markets as they evolve or remains committed to a one-size-fits-all playbook.
Growth in the Age of Shock
A quarter of the way into the 21st century, we have a clearer understanding of how it differs from the past. Our interconnected, digital, networked, and global world challenges the linear model of progress that defined the 20th century. The Age of Shock—where change begins in one place and extends everywhere—calls for a new approach to growth.
For firms and boards, this means:
Integrating the expertise needed to act in an unpredictable world
Building opportunistic and entrepreneurial capabilities to navigate uncertainty as the new terrain for value creation
Reshaping management teams for an era of plural, rather than singular, markets
Firms that develop these strengths will operate with a deeper understanding of the 21st century as it is—not as we once imagined it—and will shape the many possibilities for change and growth that the Age of Shock presents.