Reader,

For decades, leaders could rely on experience. The rules were clear. Patterns repeated. Feedback came quickly. If you put in time and paid attention to best practices, you got better.

These were kind systems—environments where learning paid off and mastery was learnable and achievable. Need a hotshot executive? Pirate one from GE. She can run any business!

But kind systems are vanishing. And in their place? Wicked systems—where the rules shift constantly, feedback is delayed or distorted, and experience doesn’t always lead to better decisions.

How valuable is your 30 years of marketing experience in a world where “influencers” and algorithms set the pace?

What’s the Difference?

A kind system is like a well-lit road. You know the direction, you’ve driven it before, and GPS confirms you’re on track. Think of routine accounting, quality control, or executing a well-known marketing playbook.

A wicked system? That’s navigating a storm without a map. The terrain changes as you move, and what worked before may lead you straight into trouble. Think about:

• Leading during a pandemic.
• Making long-term strategy decisions while AI evolves every six months.
• Responding to global supply chain disruptions in the world of on-off tariffs.

Why This Matters Now

In 2005, when Jean Egmon and I were working on The Prepared Mind of a Leader, the world was just beginning to transition. We saw signs of creative destruction and called for leaders to develop skills of critical thinking, imagination, and reflection.

Today, turbulence from ongoing creative destruction is the system. Disruption is continuous, multi-dimensional, and accelerating. Tech giants like OpenAI and Google don’t follow multi-year product roadmaps - they release paradigm-shifting tools every quarter.

Economic shifts, conflicting stakeholders, natural disasters, and political unrest don’t just complicate strategy - they rewrite the rules in real-time.

The lesson? You can’t work in wicked systems with kind-system thinking.

What Does It Take to Lead Now?

In a wicked world, leaders at ALL levels must shift from predicting to intercepting the future. That means:

• Learning fast and often, especially from failure. Spotify runs postmortems after every sprint—whether they win or stumble.
• Anticipating signals before they become trends. Purell scaled their sanitizer offerings early in the pandemic by monitoring health data long before government alerts.
• Adapting as a mindset, not a one-time event. Netflix didn’t stumble into streaming. It shifted from DVD rentals long before the market demanded it.

These are not isolated successes. They’re signs of a deeper change—organizations operating as learning systems, not control systems.

Rewiring How We Lead

We developed the Sense-Response Cycle™ to help leaders prepare for change. It’s built around four responsibilities that generally operate in a cycle.

• Sense early signals of change.
• Make sense of those signals.
• Decide on a course of action.
• Act in alignment with purpose.

That cycle still works—but in wicked environments, it must move faster, include broader inputs, and stay open to being wrong. “Making sense” is often replaced with “guessing,” and “deciding” is more often a case of “placing bets.”

Certainty is elusive. Embrace its counterpart.

So, Are You Ready?

The leaders who thrive in wicked systems don’t seek certainty. They:

• Run toward uncertainty like artists.
• Build real-time intelligence like detectives.
• Embrace experimentation like curious kids.
• Reflect like honest journalists.

The world has changed. You must, too.

An so …….

I’m working on a new book: The Prepared Mind of a Leader: Rewired for a Wicked World.​
It’s not a revision. It’s a reinvention.

Until then, ask yourself if you are playing by kind-system rules in a wicked-system world? If so, why?

Request

Please send examples of situations that seem to fit the “wicked” description.

Care to learn from the past?

As many of you know, I’ve been writing about the need to “learn from the past, deal with the present, and intercept the future.” If you’d like some interesting stories from "kinder times," you can grab Ten from Then which has ten short history snippets and some comments about “what causes the future.” The link is HERE.

Bill