From Wild Swings to a Great Rebalancing

Mark Carney didn’t mince words at Davos last week. “We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition,” he told the room. “The old order is not coming back.”

He’s right. But the real danger isn’t the volatility. It’s acting inside your organisation as if the old rules still apply.

For years, we’ve operated within what Carney called a “pleasant fiction”: a rules-based global order where, admittedly the most powerful nations often exempted themselves, but the rest of us, generally, went along to get along.

That fiction has collapsed.

Great powers now use economic integration as weapons, tariffs as leverage, financial infrastructure as coercion. Supply chains aren’t just logistics anymore; they are vulnerabilities to be exploited.

We’ve all experienced the reality of volatility in recent times and witnessed the play of action and reaction.

We’ve watched leaders respond to the geopolitical swings; reactive offshoring, tentative reshoring, AI deployed in a rush, then quietly shelved or reverted, ESG commitments announced with fanfare, then abandoned under changing policy and pressure. We’ve seen energy strategies lurching from “transition at any cost” to “security first” and back again.

We talk about external forces. But this is something else.

So, this month, we’re exploring how business leaders can respond to this constant breaking and restructuring of the rules and systems, and what the risks are of not doing so.

Because, the smartest leaders we’re working with have stopped waiting for a new normal; expecting the dust to settle. They’ve stopped believing there is a new normal. They’re doing something harder: they are rebalancing and realigning. Not once, but continuously.

2026 is calling for the Great Leadership Rebalancing. It’s the smart response to the alleged geopolitical ‘rebalancing’.  It demands a different kind of leadership: one built not on the promise of certainty, but on the deliberate cultivation of energy – enabling leaders to steer with clarity and focus regardless of the tumultuous times.

In this world, exhausted organisations aren’t just sad places to work. They’re strategically exposed.

What this “Great Rebalancing” Really Means for Leaders

Rebalancing isn’t just a geopolitical abstraction. It’s happening in your strategy meetings, in your supplier contracts, and in your AI pilots. Right now.

Take the most fundamental tension: openness versus protection.

For decades, the answer to almost every strategic question was “go global, go efficient.” That logic is broken. Now you’re navigating between global reach and local resilience, cost efficiency and supply security; ultimately its a question of opportunity vs risk. Carney put it starkly: a country (and by extension, an organisation) must be able to “feed itself, fuel itself, and defend itself.”

That doesn’t mean retreating into fortresses. As Carney warned, “a world of fortresses will be poorer, more fragile and less sustainable.” It means building “webs, not walls”: dense networks of diversified relationships you can draw on when any single connection fails. Not abandoning global integration, but redesigning it to be resilient and politically realistic.

This same tension plays out everywhere.

Energy, Not Certainty, Is the New Strategic Advantage

We need to talk about energy. Not the geopolitical kind. The human kind. It’s your biggest resource; now ask yourself, how are you managing it? Within your leadership team and within your organisation.

Geoff McDonald, former Global VP at Unilever and one of the clearest thinkers on workplace wellbeing, puts it simply: performance is a function of skills multiplied by knowledge multiplied by behaviour multiplied by energy. If energy drops to zero, performance drops to zero. It doesn’t matter how skilled or knowledgeable your people and your leaders are.

This isn’t soft stuff. It’s strategic arithmetic.

Nobody can offer their people certainty anymore. Not about markets, technology, or careers. The leaders who pretend otherwise will burn through trust. But here’s what you can offer: energy.

Energy isn’t motivation. It’s not ping-pong tables or wellness apps. It’s the difference between people leaving a room ready to act and people leaving drained. It comes from clarity of purpose, safety to experiment, meaningful connection, and access to peers wrestling with the same questions.

We see this at our cross-sector events and on our Connect programme. People arrive carrying the weight of their organisation’s problems. They leave with something different: not a new 2×2 framework, but new perspectives, and energy. Curiosity is rekindled. Courage is inspired by someone else’s story. They take away commitment to try at least one thing differently.

High-energy systems adapt. Leaders who manage their own and their organisation’s energy absorb shocks, they reconfigure, they keep moving. Low-energy systems and leaders cling to old rules and burn out.

Rebalancing Happens in Rooms, Not Roadmaps

The kind of rebalancing we’re describing doesn’t happen in powerpoint decks. It happens in rooms where leaders make sense of things together, when they share, explore, reflect and collaborate. They begin to imagine something better.

At one of our recent sessions, an operations director shared a story that stayed with everyone. His company had deployed an AI agent to handle overnight IT troubleshooting. The twist: they paired it with an intern who came in early each morning to review what the AI had done, flag anything questionable, and learn the systems in the process. The AI handled the midnight drudge work. The human provided judgement, context, and quality control.

A small example. But it sparked a bigger conversation. People started asking each other: where could AI quietly give you back hours of human attention? How can we unlock the potential within our people and within our organisations?

This is peer sense-making. Not networking. Not exchanging business cards. Not sitting through presentations. Leaders sharing what’s working, what’s failing and what they’re trying next.

Research on AI adoption backs this up. Trust and fluency don’t come from glossy roadmaps or top-down announcements. They come from small, safe experiments , from sharing and listening to  ideas and stories about what worked and what went wrong. Hearing a peer admit “we went to step three and had to go back to zero” builds the courage to explore and to try something different.

In a world where no single organisation or expert can provide an established rulebook, leaders need deliberate spaces to compare notes across sectors, test assumptions, and co-create norms.

You go back into your organisation with something to try, someone to call, and permission to adjust. That’s not a luxury. That’s how rebalancing actually happens – both on a strategic level and a personal level.

If you want to lead a rebalancing, you need to design for energy, not just engagement scores or outputs.

Human judgement versus machine capability: where could AI take you, and where must humans stay in charge? Where will you trade principles for survival: when do your stated values actually cost you something?

These aren’t separate problems. They’re variations of the same question: what are you willing to hold in tension, continuously, without resolution and when will you adjust?

Because here’s what makes rebalancing hard. There is no final destination. There’s no moment where you’ve “achieved balance” and can stop. The ground keeps shifting. You have to stay in it. It’s more demanding than crisis management. It requires energy that most organisations have already spent.

How to Lead the Great Rebalancing with Energy

Let’s get concrete. If you’re leading through this period, here are five moves that matter.

Name where your world has already changed.

Don’t rehash “the world is volatile.” Instead, identify three assumptions your strategy still relies on that no longer hold true. Is it about platform dependence? Talent mobility? Regulatory stability?

Write them down. Talk about them openly with your leadership team. As Carney urged, leaders need to “name reality” rather than going along with pleasant fictions. The assumptions need to be surfaced before they can be replaced.

Draw your human-AI boundary on purpose, with intention.

We’re seeing the emerging pattern: organisations rush to deploy, discover the gaps, then retreat to step zero. The good news is, you can reduce the whiplash. Identify where AI can safely handle the drudge work in your organisation then identify where humans must stay in charge, where decisions require discernment. Involve your people in testing and defining that line.

The goal isn’t to find the answer once; it’s to build the fluency to keep adjusting.

Turn values into “we did X even though it hurt” stories

This is the move most leaders skip. So why not try it now; pick one value from your wall. Find one real decision where you’ll let it cost you something: margin, speed, convenience. Make the decision. Then tell that story internally. Not as virtue-signalling, but as proof that your rebalance includes ethics, not just efficiency. Because when the rules are changing, ethics, values and behaviours provide consistency.

In a world where trust is scarce and everyone’s watching for hypocrisy, a single costly decision tells people more about who you are than a hundred town halls.

The Choice Ahead

We can’t put the old order back together. The ‘pleasant’ fiction is over.

But we can rebalance how we lead. Less illusion of control, more honest dialogue. Less obsession with certainty, more deliberate, sustainable energy. Fewer fortresses, more webs we can draw on when things get hard.

And we do that best when we stop trying to make sense of it alone.

The leaders who thrive in this era won’t be the ones with the best forecasts. They’ll be the ones who build high-energy systems, stay in the tension, and keep adjusting.

Carney called it a rupture. Fine. But ruptures don’t just break things. They reveal what was already fragile and what was stronger than it looked. They show up where there is lack of resilience versus sustainable opportunity.

Where is your organisation right now?

Wavelength Leadership helps organisations bring the outside world in through immersive experiences, cross-sector connections, and practical provocation. If you’re ready to build energy and sense-making into your leadership development, we should talk.