More changes are expected in the business environment over the next five years than we’ve seen in the past 50.

And for business leaders, as well as any manager aspiring for a top job, that’s become the most important thing they need to know. A lack of attention to what’s coming, rigid and uncompromising attitudes, or an inability to adapt or find the right balance between profit and social responsibility, will mean leaders being swept aside by an avalanche of change.

Traditional leadership culture has been built on hard triangles: the spearheads, arrowheads and pyramids that dramatise the principle of striking out from the front, maximising growth and profits, and achieving dominance.

There are a growing number of reasons why this approach won’t work anymore—certainly in the West—and why there is an urgent need for new kinds of leadership. There must be a different model that’s better suited to dealing with the wake of change (and the change that will keep coming); less taut and less military in manner.

In business, we need to be alert to the ‘world beyond the horizon’, to what we know is coming—we can sense the rumbles of change on its way—but the implications of which aren’t yet clear. That includes what’s already here but we haven’t seen the fall-out from yet, such as the introduction of AI and robotics.

Jobs and the jobless

Organisations are working out applications and cost-saving benefits but will next have to manage the threat from damaged employment relations, job losses and strike action. Over time, they will face the consequences in terms of higher corporate taxes needed to fund financial schemes—such as universal basic income, for example—that will be needed to avoid social breakdown as a result of mass unemployment. The choice between protecting jobs versus making efficiencies will be neither simple nor straightforward.

The balance of power in the global economy is shifting at breakneck speed. The position of the USA as the post-war economic and cultural superpower has been undermined, and that has been accompanied by recent adjustments in its attitude to free trade and the role of protectionism.

China, meanwhile, has been progressing its global strategies, forming important alliances and growing its influence in Africa and elsewhere, building its control over supplies of resources and raw materials. Developing countries don’t have to look to the USA or the EU as the only solidly wealthy allies anymore, or as the only model politically or for doing business.

Overall, what this means is that the developed economies of the West have reached a stage of maturity where strong, steady growth is more unlikely. Developing countries (and their business enterprises) can leapfrog other nations in their adoption of new technologies and approaches because they don’t have the same obstacles, whether that’s legacy tech and infrastructure to replace, worker or customer expectations or the bureaucracy and legislation around standards involved. There is enormous economic potential for countries such as India (once the way to political stability is more clear), Indonesia, and nations in Africa, such as Nigeria.

Alpha century

Over the next few years, almost a quarter of the world’s population will be members of Generation Alpha – those born since the arrival of the iPad in 2010. We don’t yet know how they will differ as employees, or what attraction, motivation and retention will involve. We just know they are digital natives, with short and restless attention spans; likely to be looking for more project-based work and the kind of instant gratification (recognition and rewards) offered by social media; more affected by the employer brands and what they mean in terms of social role and sustainability; and entitled to have a voice on those issues.

Examples from business history demonstrate how foresight isn’t enough in itself. In the early 1990s, one of the world’s oldest surviving major businesses was Encyclopaedia Britannica. Kodak had already invented the digital camera. Both had global market-leading positions and the foresight and financial clout to transform themselves and beat emerging competition—but they didn’t, because they weren’t able to change their basic DNA: selling books and making chemicals.

Critically, leaders will need to be able to convert complexity—messy complexity—into something simple and more inspiring for employees and for customers, because it will be unnecessary complexity that will drive people away from business propositions.

The need for skills

Leaders and the people around them will need fluidity in terms of mindset and skills. That means more investment in training and development, often for change and addition of skills; more bits and pieces of specialisms; and encouraging the development of internal entrepreneurs over transactional staff.

New forms of trust need to be constructed, not around what leaders say, but around what they do. Those decisions around cutting staff for AI, the potential for profit-sharing schemes, and investment into future circularity, are going to be more scrutinised and taken seriously.

It will not be so much about the forceful, profit-maximising hero anymore. As per the saying of ancient Chinese thinker Lao Tzu, the best leadership happens when people barely know the leader exists, when they think they’ve achieved everything for themselves.

Eastern organisations have taken so much from Western counterparts in terms of business operations and thinking over the past century. It will be ironic, or maybe only natural, if the West begins to prosper from these kinds of principles of Taoism: the importance of working with the flow of events and not fighting them, and of running operations that, like water, find their own level.

Joe Nellis CBE is professor of global economy and deputy dean of Cranfield School of Management.