Leading change

Principal consultant Aidan Rave looks at the paradox and practice of modern leadership

Today’s leaders stand at the intersection of complexity, constraint, and expectation. They are asked to be visionaries and pragmatists, technologists and humanists, reformers and caretakers – all while keeping their organisations stable through turbulent times.

This growing tension is redefining what leadership means. The classic image of the decisive, heroic leader has given way to something more systemic, distributed, and adaptive. The essence of leadership in 2025 is not control but capacity – the ability to create the conditions in which others can succeed, learn, and sustain performance over time.

The question for public-purpose leaders is not ‘How do I take charge?’ but ‘How do I enable movement, alignment and renewal in a system under pressure?’.

What leadership is now

1. From command to context

The modern leader is first and foremost a sense-maker. In the Harvard Business Review, leadership is increasingly framed as the art of defining purpose, curating clarity, and building a culture of learning and accountability. Effective leaders orchestrate the environment – clear direction, trusted processes, psychological safety – rather than issuing constant instruction.

2. From certainty to adaptation

Complex challenges, from financial instability to digital disruption, demand adaptive practice rather than rigid strategy. Leaders must learn to distinguish between problems that can be solved and systems that must be evolved. Their role is to mobilise experimentation and make learning visible – especially when the path forward is ambiguous.

3. From hierarchy to inclusion

Inclusion is now a performance discipline. Diverse perspectives, open dissent, and belonging drive innovation and resilience. Nesta’s research into mission-driven organisations shows that complex outcomes – climate transition, health equity, social mobility – require coalitions that cross expertise, community and geography. Leadership becomes the facilitation of many voices, not the dominance of one.

4. From plan to prototype

In an era of volatility, static strategies quickly decay. Nesta and others advocate for test-and-learn cycles: leaders who prototype, gather data, iterate, and scale what works. The leader’s job is to legitimise learning – to make failure safe and progress transparent.

5. From centre to locality

Leadership is also shifting spatially. National or system-wide missions – whether net zero, health integration or digital transformation – succeed only when owned locally. The most effective leaders are those who connect ambition at the centre with authority at the edge, building trust and alignment across layers of governance.

6. From authority to ethics

The age of AI and automation has raised new moral and practical questions. Leaders must combine fluency in technology with judgement about fairness, transparency and trust. It is not enough to understand the tools; they must steward the values that govern their use.

GGi’s perspective: leadership as stewardship

At GGi, leadership and governance are inseparable. We see leadership as governance in motion – the ongoing practice of alignment, accountability, and renewal. Strong governance provides structure; good leadership animates it with purpose and humanity.

Across sectors – from health and higher education to local government, culture, and the third sector – we see the same pressures: stretched resources, eroding public confidence, complex regulation, and relentless change. In this landscape, leadership is not about commanding compliance but about creating coherence. It is about setting tone, building trust, and sustaining courage.

Our work continually returns to a few simple truths:

• Governance should liberate, not constrain.
  Assurance frameworks and board reviews are most valuable when they clarify risk and free leaders to focus on strategy and outcomes.
• Culture is a leadership act.
  Boards and executives must actively shape culture through example, conversation and reflection—not leave it to chance.
• Courage is the catalyst.
  The hardest part of leadership is facing ambiguity and dissent while holding steady. Courage underpins all other virtues—integrity, humility, accountability, and relational skill.
• Renewal is a strategic necessity.
  Organisations that fail to invest in leadership capacity—through coaching, peer learning, governance development—gradually lose resilience. Renewal is not self-care; it is a collective responsibility.

Five moves for leading change

To make these ideas tangible, here are five practical moves that define adaptive leadership in public-purpose systems today:

1. Diagnose the system

Before acting, leaders must map the terrain—understand power dynamics, incentives, interdependencies and hidden tensions. System diagnosis clarifies where leadership is needed most: where to hold, where to delegate, where to disrupt.

2. Build the learning engine

Change sticks only when organisations can learn quickly. Leaders must embed feedback loops, rapid cycles of reflection, and safe experimentation. Failure should be reframed as data, not shame.

3. Make inclusion structural

Diversity and psychological safety should not sit in HR appendices—they belong in governance frameworks and performance metrics. Inclusive leadership means designing structures that amplify different perspectives and protect the voice of challenge.

4. Protect strategic capacity

Leadership attention is finite. Create deliberate space for reflection, horizon-scanning, and strategic conversation. Guard it fiercely against operational noise. Boards play a key role here, ensuring that leadership time is aligned to long-term priorities.

5. Treat governance as a platform

Well-run governance is not bureaucracy—it is the launchpad for better decisions. Strong assurance and constructive challenge allow leadership teams to act with confidence, not hesitation.

Why this matters now

Public-purpose organisations – local authorities, health systems, universities, cultural bodies – are operating in an environment of chronic volatility. Fiscal strain, political change, and social expectation have made continuity itself a leadership challenge. Traditional models of control no longer work. What’s needed is a deeper form of leadership: systemic, inclusive, adaptive, ethical, and sustainable.

This form of leadership demands courage and structure in equal measure. It requires boards that challenge without paralysing, executives who listen without losing direction, and cultures that can absorb uncertainty without collapse. Most of all, it requires leaders who understand that their job is not to be the system’s strength but to build it.

Leading change today means creating the space, culture and governance where others can thrive so that when the next wave of disruption comes, the system doesn’t break; it learns.