Welcome at Harvard Business Review OnPoint Magazine Spring 2022 Issue

THE MOST SUCCESSFUL leaders and businesses adapt to new realities swiftly. Say your company has invested in a new technology—but suddenly it’s rendered obsolete by a new entrant.
The world seems ready to open up—but then another Covid variant hits. You’re starting to excel on the career path you’ve built—when suddenly you’re confronted with an unexpected layoff. (Any of these sound familiar?)
To thrive in the face of crises like these, you need to be nimble and adaptable, and your teams must respond efficiently to new information. This is hard enough on a personal level. In the face of ongoing unexpected change, it’s natural for our brains to freeze up in a state of what INSEAD strategy professor Nathan Furr calls unproductive uncertainty. This issue highlights some of the best ways to break free: Furr’s research reveals mental habits that allow leaders to visualize a clear path to future success. Leadership advisers J.P. Flaum and Becky Winkler explain how to build learning agility to grow from setbacks. Harvard psychologist Susan David invites us to examine our instinctive responses and develop our emotional agility.
Fostering flexibility at the team level requires you to manage your own responses as well as those of others. But teams also offer companies opportunities for more flexibility: Creating a
temporary team on the fly can allow companies to bypass their own bureaucracy and get work done more quickly, as Harvard Business School’s Amy Edmondson and Ranjay Gulati explain.
On the company level, leaders need to equip their organizations to respond more quickly to change through structural changes, such as pushing decision-making down the org chart to those closest to customers (as described by Linda Hill, Emily Tedards, and Taran Swain), as well as external-facing initiatives, such as partnerships with local communities that build stakeholder
trust (as outlined by Jason Miklian, John E. Katsos, Angelika Rettberg, and Jennifer Oetzel).
What emerged as we read through the articles in this issue, surprisingly enough, was that while we can always move faster, the best leaders don’t just drive for more agility. According to leadership adviser John Coleman, for example, they must balance it with a sense of focus and consistency. And other authors in this issue remind us that sometimes to respond to overwhelming change, you really need to just take a deep breath and slow down.
– The Editors

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