For more than a century, leadership has been assumed to be something that resides within a single person. In times of relative stability, this assumption appeared workable. Today, however, organisations operate in conditions shaped by climate disruption, social fragmentation, geopolitical volatility, and rapid technological change. These pressures expose the limits of individual leadership and call for a more collective and systemic approach.

For generations, leadership has been shaped by the belief that its power lives within a single individual’s strengths, traits, and resilience. Accordingly, the individual leader has been expected to carry the weight of responsibility, make the tough calls, and navigate complexity alone. But a quiet revolution is underway. A new understanding is evolving that values collective sense‑making, relational dynamics, and shared responsibility.

In a world where we are asked to move faster, think smarter, and carry more complexity than ever before, we may find ourselves living almost entirely in the realm of the mind. Strategies, meetings, metrics, and decisions stack on top of one another, leaving little space for a deeper kind of knowing - the kind that lives in the body, in the nervous system, and in our relationship with the natural world.

As the world pivots toward regenerative, inclusive, and stakeholder-driven models of value creation, a deeper challenge is emerging; one that’s often overlooked in the rush to innovate. It’s not just about new strategies or economic paradigms. It’s about the people leading them. Specifically, it’s about a growing mismatch between the complexity of today’s systems and the developmental capacities of those expected to navigate them. This is what researchers are calling the complexity gap.