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Geopolitics

Blend youth with experience to navigate geopolitical risk

Published August 5, 2025 in Geopolitics • 6 min read

Many senior executives see geopolitical turbulence as business as usual. A new study shows younger leaders are more willing to accept the true nature of change. Their views must be heard, say Fabian Buder and Felix Rüdiger.

For decades, the West, anchored by the US and Europe, has shaped markets, institutions, and global norms. The return of President Donald Trump has exacerbated unpredictability: transatlantic cooperation, multilateralism, and regulatory coherence are in flux. In Europe, this compounds existing pressures – from sluggish economies to security concerns – and deepens the need for strategic courage. 

New power centers in Asia, Africa, and Latin America are asserting themselves. This shift toward multipolarity is not merely geopolitical – it is reshaping regulation, disrupting supply chains, and amplifying market volatility. Leaders across sectors must grasp that multipolarity is now a defining condition of doing business, requiring fresh thinking and adaptive leadership. However, this does not appear to be what is happening. The 2025 edition of Voices of the Leaders of Tomorrow, a joint study of the Nuremberg Institute for Market Decisions and the St. Gallen Symposium, found that many business leaders may underestimate the significance of these changes, with profound implications for the future health of their organizations and the global economy. The report surveyed 275 senior executives from the world’s largest companies, as well as 800 emerging global talents under 35 – what we call the St. Gallen Symposium’s ‘Leaders of Tomorrow’ community.

Senior executives unperturbed, ‘Leaders of Tomorrow’ see transformation

What stands out: senior executives view today’s geopolitical realignments as cyclical, rather than structural. Only 39% view these shifts as a complete transformation or major disruption – compared to 72% of our younger cohort, who see more deep-cutting change. Just over half of senior leaders view the shifts as “moderate changes”, suggesting a belief in institutional resilience rather than systemic disruption (only 18% of tomorrow’s global talents are aligned with this more incremental view).

Other findings confirm this pattern: 49% of senior executives are optimistic about global stability amid power shifts, while only a third of the Leaders of Tomorrow community share this view. This divide is particularly pronounced among younger talent in the US (16%) and Switzerland (15%), showing the lowest levels of optimism. Indeed, younger respondents express greater doubt: roughly one in three are pessimistic about the future, a sentiment shared by only 8% of their more experienced counterparts.

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The generational divide widens when it comes to expectations of future geopolitical and economic scenarios. While senior executives more often expect stabilization and institutional resilience, future leaders consistently anticipate more disruptive outcomes. For example, younger respondents were more inclined to think that major powers will prioritize national interests, resulting in a fragmented global landscape, whereas more experienced executives tended to put faith in the power of cooperation.

IbyIMD-ArticleGraph- Blend youth with experience to navigate geopolitical risk-Graph-3

The risk of sticking to the mental models of a vanished world

The perspectives revealed in the report highlight a critical divide: today’s senior executives largely see geopolitical shifts as manageable and evolutionary. Tomorrow’s leaders perceive a fundamental inflection point, marked by sustained disruption rather than temporary turbulence. Recent events – tensions in the Middle East causing critical shipping disruptions, prolonged economic fallout from the Russia–Ukraine conflict, escalating US–China trade frictions, and Donald Trump’s unpredictable trade and security policies – validate the next generation’s cautious outlook. They are more willing to accept the fundamental and substantive nature of the transformative forces at play.

Senior leaders’ expectation of stability and continuity, in turn, signals a profound risk of inertia at the top: are they too reliant on old mental models of the relatively prosperous and peaceful decades after the end of the Cold War? This shows that experience, while invaluable, can become a liability when it defaults to outdated models in moments that demand reinvention. Younger generations are less tied to old mental models. Their curiosity and openness can drive the rapid adaptation that is urgently required.

It is our view that businesses would be well advised to seriously consider the perspectives of the Leaders of Tomorrow community. It is no longer sufficient to shape strategy on the expectation of minor geopolitical adjustments. Strategic preparedness now requires proactively anticipating deeper, lasting disruptions. Whether leaders embrace such a vigilant mindset or not may determine which organizations successfully navigate an increasingly volatile multipolar world.

How do they see the future of leadership and business strategy?

Three calls to action: transform, decentralize, and embrace the next generation

Our findings offer a wake-up call for senior executives from the minds of the next generation of the world’s leading young researchers, business talents, policymakers, and societal advocates. How do they see the future of leadership and business strategy? What is their key advice to those navigating an extremely challenging geopolitical environment?

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First, the next generation calls on businesses to fundamentally transform corporate structures. 65% of the Leaders of Tomorrow – compared to roughly half of senior executives – believe these structures are ill-equipped to manage the challenges posed by current geopolitical shifts. The leaders of the future call on senior executives to build their organizations’ capabilities to anticipate risks, rewire value chains, and react quickly when short-term disruptions hit.

Two priorities stand out: The younger generation places significantly more emphasis on organizational adaptability compared to their senior counterparts, meaning that they are likely to advocate for dynamic scenario planning and agile pivot strategies. Securing critical resources (talent, energy, data) is a significantly greater concern for emerging talent than for their senior counterparts, indicating that younger leaders would prioritize investing in securing supply chains, talent, and data pipelines amid geopolitical competition. This resonates with what Nikolaus Lang, Global Leader of the BCG Henderson Institute, calls the need for businesses to “build their geopolitical muscle”.

Second, the next generation thinks current disruptions require a more decentralized approach to decision-making and leadership. More than two-thirds of this cohort strongly prefer distributed decision-making, advocating for greater empowerment at all levels of the organization. They believe that leadership should be participatory and distributed rather than concentrated at the top. In contrast, most senior executives (57%) lean toward centralized authority. In their view, top management is responsible for making critical strategic decisions and maintaining clear control over the organization’s direction, a model associated with stability and consistency.

These opposing viewpoints pose a critical leadership challenge: How can an organization foster agility and inclusivity without sacrificing strategic consistency? Solving this issue will likely require reimagining leadership structures, making room for younger leaders’ input and initiative while still leveraging senior leaders’ experience and big-picture perspective.

And this is what the third takeaway focuses on: the future generation calls on senior executives to involve them more meaningfully in decision-making. As a global report by the UN Youth Office, the Club of Rome, and the St. Gallen Symposium found, such intergenerational leadership can serve as a key driver for financial, sustainability, and social performance. This is because it helps organizations to counterbalance experience with curiosity and established knowledge with the ability to question the status quo. In times of geopolitical disruption, involving diverse generations can help businesses update their sensemaking capabilities and enhance their agility.

So, what are the best ways to reap the benefits of intergenerational collaboration? Both generations converged around three ideas that leaders and organizations can put into practice:

  • Joint problem-solving sessions: Regular meetings to address challenges through different generational lenses
  • Experience sharing forums: Regular sessions where different generations share insights and challenges
  • Innovation tandems: Pairing leaders from different generations on focused initiatives

Intergenerational leadership should not be seen as a future aspiration: it’s a strategic imperative for organizations seeking to navigate geopolitical upheaval. Moving towards intergenerational leadership doesn’t take a sophisticated, lengthy process or a perfectly age-balanced board. Our findings suggest that tangible, pragmatic steps to move in the right direction may be most effective. The challenge now is to overcome the barriers and to seize the clear advantages offered.

Authors

Fabian Buder-1

Fabian Buder

Head of Future & Trends Research, Nuremberg Institute for Market Decisions

Fabian Buder heads the Future & Trends Research Group at the Nuremberg Institute for Market Decisions (NIM). In his research, he examines the impact of technical innovations and social trends on the future of decision-making in markets. One focus is currently on the influence of artificial intelligence (AI) on the decision-making processes of marketing managers and the question of what the future of marketing will look like in the metaverse. Since 2021, he has also been a Research Affiliate at the Institute for the Future IFTF in Palo Alto, USA. He is a lecturer at German and international universities, workshop facilitator and speaker.

Felix-Rudier-1

Felix Rüdiger

Doctoral researcher

Felix Rüdiger is a doctoral researcher on organization and culture at the University of St. Gallen.  He regularly publishes on issues related to organizational culture, strategy and sustainability, including for Harvard Business Review, the International Labour Organization and BCG.  He is also the former Head Content and Research at the St. Gallen Symposium, one of the world’s leading platforms for cross-generational dialogue. At the Symposium, he curated dialogue formats, research publications, and developed impact initiatives. This included the Symposium’s joint initiative with the Club of Rome “A New Generational Contract”, leveraging intergenerational leadership for more long-term, sustainable strategies in business and policy.

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