A few days ago, I was talking with a friend who works in leadership development. He's a published author, fantastic keynote speaker, and works magic with teams. We got onto the topic of thought leadership in the age of AI. What once required real skill, making sense of disparate ideas and synthesizing them into something worth saying, is now something anyone with basic prompting knowledge can approximate. Something that once held significant value is losing its differentiation and worth.

I kept thinking about that conversation as I wrote this, because it's the same dynamic playing out in leadership right now.

When Experience Becomes a Liability

For most of our careers, experience was the thing. The leader who'd seen the cycle before, who'd navigated the downturn, who'd integrated the acquisition—that person was the most valuable person in the room. Their pattern recognition was the asset.

Here's what we're watching happen in real time: that equation is quietly reversing.

The leaders we're seeing struggle aren't the ones who lack experience. They're the ones whose experience is so deeply reliable, so trusted, that it's become the lens through which they filter everything new. And when the environment has fundamentally shifted—not just gotten faster, but actually operates by different rules—that lens distorts more than it clarifies.

We've started calling this discontinuity. Not disruption, which implies the old order will eventually return. Not transformation, which assumes a predictable arc. Discontinuity is something harder: a permanent break in causality, where what worked to get you here is no longer a reliable guide to what comes next.

What This Means for Leadership Development

Most leadership development is built on an assumption that's now worth questioning: that we can identify the skills leaders need, teach those skills, and watch performance improve. Build the competency. Transfer the knowledge. Reward certainty.

That model worked when the environment was stable enough for expertise to transfer. When past patterns predicted future ones. When the answer was knowable if you just brought in the right person who'd done it before.

But when the environment itself breaks from its own history? When the thing that made your best leaders excellent is now limiting their ability to see clearly?

The development question changes. It's no longer just what capabilities does this individual need? It becomes something more collective: what shared understanding of our business is now obsolete, and what do we need to build together to replace it?

That's a fundamentally different kind of work.

So, What’s Next?

We'll be writing more about this over the coming weeks: what discontinuity means in practice, why traditional approaches to leadership development are struggling to keep up, and what it looks like when teams build the capacity to lead through it. We’ll also share insights from the work we’re doing with teams and companies to not just navigate, but thrive within it.

If this is landing somewhere real for you—if you've been in a room lately where smart, capable people kept reaching for the same playbook and coming up short—I'd genuinely love to hear about it.

Set up a call so we can talk about what you're experiencing.