The latest data from Accenture’s Pulse of Change (September 2025) should stop leaders in their tracks: 90% of C-suite executives say the pace of change has accelerated since January, yet only 42% feel prepared to meet it—down from 46% earlier in the year. In other words, the gap is widening between how fast the world is moving and how ready leaders are to respond.
Knowing these statistics, we should be asking this question: How do we reverse this trend and close the gap?
Unfortunately, I don’t think that most organizations know how to effectively answer this question.
Most organizations try to close the gap by putting their leaders through development programs that focus on gaining new knowledge and skills. That’s useful—but it’s horizontal development.
When the ground is moving under your feet, horizontal development alone won’t stabilize you.
What leaders need is vertical development—upgrading the internal capacity that governs how they make sense of complexity, regulate emotion under pressure, and flex identity when roles and realities shift.
What it actually takes to navigate a rapid pace of change
Below are the capabilities I see separating leaders who surf change from those who get swamped.
- Learning/Growth Orientation
Curiosity, openness to disconfirming data, a “prove-and-improve” mindset, and the willingness to step into the learning zone (not just staying in the comfort zone). Leaders with this orientation metabolize volatility as input rather than threat. - Self-Mastery
Accurate self-awareness, emotion regulation, stress tolerance, resilience. When disruption spikes, these leaders don’t outsource stability to circumstances—they generate it. - Adaptive Identity
Clarity of purpose and values, psychological flexibility, and comfort with ambiguity and role shifts. They can let go of outdated self-definitions quickly enough to adopt new ones that fit emerging realities. - Future-Ready Mindsets
A promotion focus (purpose over perfection or results), an outward/other-oriented stance, and abundance over scarcity. These mindsets expand option-sets and create collaboration headroom when fear shrinks it.
None of this is primarily the product of horizontal development. You can’t “tell” someone into flexibility or “teach” your way to emotion regulation.
Why horizontal tactics won’t close the widening gap
Horizontal development scales breadth; vertical development scales depth. Horizontal answers “What should I do?” Vertical answers “Who must I become so I can do it reliably under pressure?”
When the disruption curve is steepening—and leaders’ preparedness is slipping behind it—piling on more content often backfires. It inflates cognitive load without upgrading the internal processor. That’s how organizations end up with smart, skilled leaders who still stall when the stakes and ambiguity peak.
Accenture’s latest numbers are a signal, not just a stat: the environment is outpacing leaders’ current internal capacity. Closing that gap requires a different intervention logic.
So, how do we actually build these capacities?
Short answer: upgrade the internal operating system (vertical development). Practically, that looks like:
- Targeted mindset awareness and development to surface mental blocks, self-protective beliefs (e.g., “If I don’t have the answer, I’m not credible”), and fears that silently cap adaptability.
- Deliberate, titrated discomfort (learning-zone challenges) paired with coaching that helps leaders stay present and stay curious when triggered, rather than retreating to control or avoidance.
- Emotion regulation training in context (breathwork, cognitive defusion, somatic skills) so leaders can downshift physiological threat and re-access executive function in real time.
- Identity work that ties decisions to purpose and values, enabling faster letting-go of legacy success formulas that no longer fit.
- Social practices (peer coaching, feed-forward, other-orientation reps) that widen perspective and reduce self-protective narrowing under stress.
- Shifting gears. Most leaders operate in “urgent mode,” especially so in times of change. We need to help leaders upgrade their operating system so that they can more readily operate in “important mode.”
This is not “soft.” It’s systems work on the human system—the only lever that reliably converts complexity into capacity.
A candid reality from the field
Across the organizations I’ve worked with, on average, 60% of leaders present with a fixed mindset. That profile is misaligned with rising complexity: fixed mindsets amplify threat detection, compress possibility, and stall learning when the environment demands the opposite. Until you address that, additional content mostly bounces off the shield.
A simple roadmap to close the gap
- Diagnose the operating system, not just the skill set. Use validated mindset measures and stress-response profiling to establish a vertical baseline.
- Design vertical reps, not just courses. Convert business priorities into experiments that provoke growth (short cycles, safe-to-fail, with coaching).
- Develop leaders’ capacity to notice, name, and navigate their triggers. Build somatic and cognitive skills that keep them in the learning zone under load.
- Do identity work on purpose. Create routines that connect decisions to values and future-self narratives to accelerate adaptive role shifts.
- Make mindsets a team sport. Normalize real-time feedback, assumption testing, and other-oriented behaviors; reward learning velocity, not just outcomes.
- Measure capacity, not just completion. Track shifts in mindset, regulation under pressure, decision quality in ambiguity, and speed of course correction.
The call to action
The pace of change isn’t letting up; preparedness is slipping. Horizontal development alone won’t close the gap. The organizations that will win the next decade are the ones that upgrade their leaders’ internal operating systems—on purpose, at scale, and tied to real work.
So, what are you doing to close the gap? Are you employing vertical development? Are you upgrading your leaders’ internal operating systems?
If you want help putting vertical development to work with your leaders, let’s connect.
