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Strategy
What if volatility became your competitive advantage?
Protecting against disruption is no longer enough. In a post-stability economy, businesses need to reinvent continuously – and learn how to profit from volatility.
Rapid read:
- In a post-stability economy, volatility is part of the operating environment, requiring leaders to move beyond resilience and learn how to turn disruption into competitive advantage.
- Continuous reinvention should become an organizational process, with businesses building portfolios of experiments and generating new sources of advantage before existing ones expire.
- Monetizing volatility does not mean ignoring risk – it means anticipating change, responding quickly to emerging opportunities and giving people the skills and agency to adapt continuously.
The bigger opportunity is to ask how volatility can be used as an advantage – and ultimately, how it can be monetized.
Why do some systems survive disruption while others collapse? It is a question born from watching an entire country unravel, and one that has driven 25 years of research into organizational survival and reinvention.
I come from a country that didn’t survive: the Soviet Union. I was born in Kazakhstan, where the scars of that history ran deep – from hundreds of nuclear weapons tests to a devastating Soviet-engineered famine. Then, in 1991, the Soviet Union itself collapsed.
What began as a personal attempt to make sense of that history – and understand why some large organizations survived the extreme uncertainty of the post-Soviet era while others did not – soon became a much bigger question for me.
By the early 2000s, the corporate world was providing plenty more to study, as Enron collapsed, other seemingly formidable companies faltered, and corporate lifespans kept shrinking.
Twenty-five years later, the question is more urgent than ever, but simply surviving disruption is no longer enough. We have entered what I call a post-stability economy, where disruption is no longer an interruption but part of the operating environment. The relatively low-volatility decades that followed the Second World War – particularly in Western economies – taught generations of leaders to treat stability as normal and disruption as the exception. Increasingly, that period of relative stability looks like the anomaly. Yet measures such as the World Uncertainty Index show global uncertainty trending upward over the past 25 years, with repeated spikes around major shocks. For leaders, this means moving beyond protecting the organization from volatility, mitigating its risks, or simply surviving until conditions improve. The bigger opportunity is to ask how that volatility can be used as an advantage – and ultimately, how it can be monetized.
When the environment is relatively predictable, it makes sense to optimize for efficiency and control.
A management playbook built for another era
Part of the problem is that much of modern management theory was developed for precisely the world that is disappearing.
When the environment is relatively predictable, it makes sense to optimize for efficiency and control. Just-in-time supply chains work beautifully when supplies arrive as expected, and a distinctive product, technology, or price can look like a sustainable competitive advantage, something worth protecting for years.
But those ideas all rest on an assumption of predictability. A lean supply chain can turn into a vulnerability the moment one critical component runs out, and an advantage that once took competitors years to replicate can now disappear much faster, as AI and reverse engineering accelerate imitation. That doesn’t mean discarding everything management has taught us; these ideas worked well for the conditions they were built for. But we need to be honest about when those conditions have changed.
More than a decade ago, Columbia Business School professor Rita McGrath introduced the idea of transient advantage, arguing that in fast-changing environments competitive advantages increasingly come and go. Yet leaders are still asking: How do we find a sustainable competitive advantage?
In a post-stability economy, the more useful question may be how quickly an organization can create the next one.
If advantages have shorter shelf lives, no single product, feature, or technology can protect a company indefinitely. What matters is the ability to generate new advantages before the old ones expire. In a post-stability economy, that capacity for reinvention becomes the advantage.
This also changes how we need to think about reinvention itself.
Reinvention is a process, not a project
This also changes how we need to think about reinvention itself. In the old model, reinvention was an event: every five or 10 years, an organization might embark on a major transformation program, complete with a name, a roadmap, and a clear end point. Employees went through the disruption expecting that, eventually, it would finish and everyone could get back to business as usual.
That bargain is becoming impossible to keep. In a post-stability economy, reinvention has to become a continuous process.
Continuous doesn’t mean changing everything every second of every day. Think of it like brushing your teeth: ignoring them for seven years and then brushing furiously for two weeks doesn’t work. What matters is a regular rhythm.
That rhythm looks different from one organization to another. Research by the Reinvention Academy found that in 2024, more than half of companies needed to reinvent every three years or less, while nearly one in five were doing so every 12 months or less. A consumer tech company will need to move faster than a business with long investment cycles, so there is no magic number. What matters is having a process that continually generates new sources of advantage.
That means moving away from one or two golden ideas and toward a portfolio of experiments: testing hypotheses, investing in what works, and removing what doesn’t. The aim is to generate new sources of advantage faster than the old ones expire, because increasingly, they expire like milk.
Don’t wait for disruption
Kazakh children’s clothing company Mimioriki shows what this looks like in practice. As COVID-19 began to spread, its leaders anticipated that borders could close and face masks become scarce, so they developed samples and pricing before lockdown. When restrictions arrived, they were ready to move.
Then the environment changed again. Millions of people were suddenly working from home and wanted clothes that were comfortable but still presentable on a video call. Mimioriki responded by developing Global Nomads, an adult clothing brand for this new market.
What mattered was the company’s readiness to respond as conditions changed – what sprinters call the low start: not running yet, but ready to go the moment the signal comes. Organizations may not know exactly what happens next, but they can be just as ready to move when it does.
Shape what's next
Strategy programs
The future won’t wait for your strategy to catch up
Explore programsLook for the opportunity in volatility
The traditional response to volatility also needs to evolve. Identifying risk, modeling scenarios, and protecting the existing business still matter – but not when so much energy goes into defending against volatility that little is left for asking what opportunity it might create.
Predicting exactly what happens next is also becoming harder. Disruptions don’t arrive one at a time – one event triggers another, and another. Futurist Roger Spitz calls these families of interconnected disruptions “metaruptions.” Put more simply: black swans now come in flocks, and they lay eggs.
This is where traditional scenario planning starts to reach its limits. Instead of spending time trying to predict which future will arrive, it can be more useful to ask what opportunities could emerge across several different futures – and what would put the organization in a low start whichever way events turn.
That requires a different instinct. When tariffs change or a supply chain breaks, it’s natural to ask why it happened and when things will return to normal. But time spent fighting the new reality is time not spent asking what it has made possible.
Leaders still need to ask how to protect themselves. But that question needs to sit alongside another: What opportunity has this disruption just created, and are we ready to move?
Mars offers an example of what that instinct can look like at scale. The company entered pet food as far back as the 1930s, but it didn’t stop there. Over time, it moved deeper into specialist nutrition with Royal Canin, into veterinary care through businesses including Banfield, VCA, and AniCura, and more recently into diagnostics and pet-health science. Today, its veterinary businesses alone care for more than 35 million pets a year across around 3,000 clinics worldwide.
The lesson isn’t simply to diversify. It is to keep looking for the next source of growth before the current one runs out. Mars didn’t abandon the businesses that came before. It added new growth curves around them, progressively expanding from products into services, health, and science. That is the instinct organizations need if they want to move from mitigating volatility to monetizing it.
That new reality needs to be made explicit from recruitment and onboarding onward and reflected in how people are developed and supported.
Rewrite the contract around change
None of this can happen through strategy alone. If reinvention is going to be continuous, people need to be ready for it too.
For decades, organizations operated on an implicit psychological contract: change for us now, and we’ll leave you alone for a while. No leader can honestly make that promise anymore, yet most organizations have never rewritten the contract – so employees keep navigating one transformation after another while still being told stability is waiting on the other side.
That new reality needs to be made explicit from recruitment and onboarding onward and reflected in how people are developed and supported. Human beings don’t necessarily dislike change. From the moment we are born, we learn, experiment, and adapt. What people dislike is change that happens to them, decided behind closed doors and then “change managed” into them. Give people the skills and agency to reinvent, and continuous change stops being something done to them.
Learning to sail
Learning to profit from volatility doesn’t mean pretending that volatility is good. Most leaders would prefer more predictable geopolitics, technology, competitors, and supply chains. But wishing for stability will not bring it back.
In my forthcoming book, The Reinvention Advantage, I argue that this requires a different relationship with volatility: not simply becoming better at surviving it but learning how to use it to create new sources of value.
Nature does this remarkably well: natural systems never assume a stable environment and adapt continuously while preserving their own integrity. Organizations need to get much better at the same thing.
There’s a simple way to think about the shift: we used to walk on land; now we’re in water. Water isn’t worse than land if you have a ship and sails – it’s only a problem if you’re still trying to drive a tank.
The answer isn’t to build a better tank or wait for the water to disappear. It is to accept that the environment has changed, build the capabilities to navigate it – and learn how to sail.
Nadya Zhexembayeva is a speaker at the 18th Global Peter Drucker Forum taking place on 4–5 November 2026 in Vienna.
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