Leadership Beyond The Great Pause: Climate Change And Other Wicked Problems

The purpose of this paper is to provoke discussion and reflection in leaders with respect to the styles of leadership now required across sectors to deal with the significant wicked and super wicked problems now faced. Many business leaders now understand that their current management structures and leadership styles are not up to the challenge of successfully leading their organisations in a VUCA world... and our climate crisis guarantees a VUCA world for the foreseeable future. Yet, they do not know how to successfully deal with our climate crisis. They have never faced a situation like this before. There is no precedent or roadmap. Having excelled historically at solving linear-style problems, they want to know what to do to not only survive, but to thrive, in this new abnormal, full of wicked problems like climate change. A different form of leadership is required, one that is more agile, ambidextrous, and flexible. The application of futures thinking within organisations is a vital skill in accomplishing this, individually and cultural. The article applies scenarios developed for a covid world by Milojevic and Inayatullah (2021) to a world that must confront climate change and other wicked problems. These scenarios are then interrogated to identify the benefits to leaders of unearthing the narratives that leaders and their organisations are unwittingly bound by.