Thinking the Unthinkable
Why leaders must challenge longstanding assumptions on how to lead during the new disruption
Nik Gowing
Co-author of Thinking the Unthinkable and a Visiting Professor at King’s College, London and Nanyang Technological University in Singapore
Chris Langdon
Co-author of Thinking the Unthinkable and founder and director of Reconciliation Through film

- This article was originally published as part of the 2018 edition of Bled Strategic Times, the official gazzette of the Bled Strategic Forum (BSF) international conference. You can access the full version of this and other BSF publications by visiting our official website.
Today, leaders in governments, corporations and institutions face a whole new landscape of disruption and uncertainty. Increasingly, the present and future is a world of new unthinkables and unpalatables. It is a level of uncertainty that few have ever experienced. Therefore they are not prepared for it and are struggling to handle it.
Indeed, the world is now moving much faster and in directions which most leaders are not prepared for. In too many surprise respects it is nothing like what their careers had trained them for. Whether in the corporate, government or institutional sectors, leaders are not willing to embrace this reality. In too many ways they are getting derailed by it. This is because their mindset is largely conformist and conditioned by how they got to the top. As hundreds of them have admitted candidly in 1–1 interviews and conversations for our fast moving, ongoing Thinking the Unthinkable research project on leadership, it is not appropriate to the level of disruption that is going on.
They are certainly not prepared for it. What we’re seeing is an unravelling of much of the glue of institutional frameworks and relationships between countries and corporations in ways which no one has ever experienced. A main insight from our project is that this is like a new wartime. It is a destabilising war on assumptions of stability. This is being created by a whole raft of disrupted ideas and principles that no one has predicted or expected.
It is not a war of weapons, and it is not just about cyber warfare. It’s about the unravelling of what everyone has expected would be stable since World War II and the Bretton Wood agreements of the late 1940’s. The stability, reliability and strength of international agreements and treaties are not only being challenged, they are being actively undermined.
And you can date this unravelling to 2014. You can see it when the Russian President Vladimir Putin decided to essentially invade Eastern Ukraine by proxy and seize Crimea in violation of international treaties. You can see it in the new relationship of the People’s Republic of China to other parts of the world, particularly with the islands in the South China Sea. You can see it challenging everything that everyone assumed was guaranteed in terms of stability and the level of predictability.
That is what is unthinkable. But it is also unpalatable. The evidence of what loomed was usually there. But few wanted to believe it.
Most leaders in governments, corporations or institutions are still not prepared to understand the enormity of the challenge to everything they have long been prepared for and assumed. After four years of study, the main finding of our Thinking the Unthinkable project (see www.thinkunthink.org) is that the conformity that gets you to the top in many ways now disqualifies you from understanding and appreciating the enormity of disruption and its implications, and how to handle it.
And we can tell you that no one — absolutely no one even at the highest executive levels — rejects this finding. Indeed they nod their heads and encourage us to keep the research going. They want to know what solutions there might be. They confirm how much they need them!
What we have identified is something which every leader is deeply concerned about. The words they volunteer to us confidentially are ‘scared’ and ‘overwhelmed’ by the acute pressures of the ‘short term’. And that’s what’s quite remarkable. They choose those words. Recently they have also volunteered the new imperatives for inclusivity, diversity, different behaviour and getting over the instinct for denial.
Impact of Unthinkables
What evidence do we have of the impact that these unthinkables can have on leadership? Look at the migration crisis which hit Europe in 2015. That was warned about for at least two years by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, and also the International Organisation for Migration. They both alerted European governments that their nations will face a significant migration problem because of the war in Syria and the threatening exodus from north Africa.
But most leaders didn’t believe the migration crisis would happen. It was an unthinkable. They were not prepared to believe that it would happen on the scale at which it did. Why is this important? The migration crisis was not unthinkable: in reality it was unpalatable. All those governments should have prepared themselves well in advance instead of panicking in the summer of 2015 when vast numbers of people scrambled on to boats and tried to get in through Southeast Europe and Italy.
I remember chairing the opening debate of the 2015 Bled Strategic Forum. Among the panellists in the opening session were Donald Tusk, President of the European Council, and Kolinda Grabar-Kitarovič, President of Croatia. Refugees and migrants were swamping many routes up from Greece. Many governments were confronting a human wave they claimed they never expected, but which was organising itself super efficiently by mobile phone. Croatia was struggling to cope with huge numbers on the move. Slovenia wondered what it would soon face. Hungary was erecting razor wire. “We failed to see it because we were too politically correct,” President Grabar-Kitarovič confided a few months later.
The unimagined scale of the human exodus ended up causing the unthinkable radicalization of politics in parts of Europe. It prompted new political realignments in countries like Germany, Poland, Hungary and Italy, with the decimation of traditional parties in France.
As EU First Vice President Frans Timmerman confirmed to me on the platform at the Bled Forum 2017, earlier that year it had left the EU and all it stood for “on the brink”. The threat from unthinkables had become existential for Europe’s unity.
In Germany, Chancellor Angela Merkel made a serious misjudgement. She barely survived the general election in September 2017. It took her six months to form a new coalition government. It was the price she paid for not being willing to understand the enormity of the migration challenge two years earlier. Accepting one million refugees was a warm humanitarian gesture. But the outcome destabilised traditional politics in Germany. It had the same impact in Poland. And similar in Hungary, where there is a super nationalist government which has both fuelled and benefitted from anti-migrant sentiments.
What is unfolding is a phenomenon which should not just be labelled populism. It is Push-Backism. Anti-establishment-ism. People are forcefully pushing back against those who in their eyes have failed. Those who were affected by the migration crisis, those whose jobs and lives were threatened, blame their leaders and globalisation. They want things to go back to the way they seemed few years ago, even if that is unlikely to provide the answers they are looking for or expecting. The overall direction of travel is towards greater radicalism and less accommodation for policies that create disillusionment.
Prepare for even bigger disruptions
And in many ways, you haven’t seen anything yet. Artificial intelligence (AI) and algorithms are already decimating the normal assumptions of stability within countries. The strategic challenge now is a threat to social stability. Jobs which many people assume will be there to enable them to enjoy their lives, or at least to have enough to feed their families, simply won’t exist. Many jobs in the retail sector or banking and financial sector, will be replaced by AI and algorithms.
Coming down the track is the prospect of a hollowing out of the middle class. Jobs that the middle and lower middle classes have traditionally taken, and which provide the spending power for every community, may soon and swiftly vaporise. This could then create even greater problems for social stability for many countries, which increasingly discredited leaders will be expected to handle. But can they?
Costs of being stuck in old ways
Are the leaders prepared to even countenance such unthinkables and unpalatables which will test their traditional political abilities and instincts?
Our work and project doubts that. Conformity of political instincts means new unthinkables are not even on radar screens while political survival within the usual election cycle is at stake. Political and corporate leaders have already lost credibility in the eyes of those they serve and those who vote for them. Political leaders have lost control and influence because the public is disillusioned. That is a huge credibility deficit to overcome. To do so may no longer be possible.
This prompts an even more profound question to be debated at this Bled Forum.
What is National Security? We argue it is now way beyond defence of the homeland against kinetic and terror threats that are reminiscent of this region in the 1990’s. With the new scale of unthinkables security is now as much about how to protect national stability faced with the new hollowing out of so much that has been assumed to guarantee that stability.
Need for new, smart leadership
But there are reasons for optimism. Smart leaders who get the issues and do not reject them as a blip will work to ensure that corporates and governments with their public servants can thrive on change. If people accept that conformity is an issue, there are ways now for solutions to be found, or at least, options of solutions. None of them are easy. None of them guarantee success. But they are there as our case studies confirm.
The primary need is to accept the scale of unthinkables with a new courage and humility. It is about leaders opening their eyes to unthinkables. Leaders should accept the inevitability of unpalatables. This means there must be a different relationship with their shareholders, stakeholders and voters. As some leaders have told us, often this requires a new empathy and humility.
Already, in gatherings like the CEO Initiative from Fortune Magazine, and to a certain extent the World Economic Forum (WEF), you’ll hear voices raising real concerns that the future of capitalism is at risk. This is because the public are questioning the right of companies to have a license to operate. A month after this Bled Forum, one of the world’s few top corporate women leaders Indra Nooyi will step down after twelve years as Chair and CEO of PEPSICO. She realised the existential threat to the giant food corporate from a growing numbers of disaffected customers and disillusioned consumers. Under the rubric ‘Performance with Purpose’ she successfully transitioned much of PEPSICO from sugar-based products to more healthy and sustainable products.
Nooyi was also one of the few leaders to spot early on that the nature of work, skills and corporate ethics has to change well beyond window dressing. This is because the next generation are saying, “I only want to work for an organisation, or company, or start-up which is sustainable, which believes in renewables, and which believes in a degree of social justice.”
These are profound changes that most leaders are reluctant to embrace with more than tokenism that can be noted in the annual report.
In a letter dated 16 January 2018, Laurence Fink, the chief executive of BlackRock Investments, decided to go public highlighting exactly these problems — the need for new purpose for government, a new purpose for corporations.
There was also a call for a new set of values. This is not necessarily about money, but about the value of what you do, and the value to society. That, coming from the biggest financial company in the world, speaks volumes. The same sentiments were echoed by Joe Kaeser, the global chief executive of Siemens the engineering giant.
So, already, the leadership mountains may be moving potentially in a positive direction. But there remains an enormous amount of resistance, scepticism and denial. Most in positions of leadership in governments and the corporate world are not prepared to accept these new realities. This was highlighted in the PricewaterhouseCoopers CEO
survey which was published in January 2018. There are still far too many who believe that what we have described is a blip — a transitory kind of situation, a freak occurrence. They believe that somehow, we’re going to return to the way things were.
The extensive data we have gathered leads us to say strongly that this is a flawed planning assumption of governments and of corporations. Some are beginning to wake up to that. But their response is nothing like enough when you see the daily evidence growing around us. When you hear President Putin suddenly talking about the new breed of invincible nuclear weapons that Russia is developing, and you see the new power of the People’s Republic of China, these are new realities which are completely fragmenting all the assumptions of stability that there have been up to now.
So it’s about having open eyes, open ears and open minds. There must be a new cultiure, behaviour and mindset for leaders. Also, what’s needed is a degree of courage, probably a degree of humility, and the realisation that in this new wave of unthinkables, things aren’t going back to the way they were before. It is now a war time on ideas and on stability, the kind that the Bled Stratgeic Forum should play a key part in debating and airing.
The final word is this: you have to be courageous enough to recalibrate leadership skills smartly, at high speed. And you have to build trust. Things are moving very quickly. Leadership needs to be brave and humble enough to realise this. Then those at the top will not be caught out by the inevitable unthinkables that have yet to be thought about. That is when they have a massive potential to hit hard and in unexpected ways.
It will mirror the shock and surprise on the faces of leaders on the Bled Forum in 2015 who could not come to terms of the scale of what was becaming the existential threat to European unity from the unpalatable human tide of refugees and economic migrants. It was on an unthinkable scale they had never believed possible. But it happened.
‘Thinking the Unthinkable’ is a new book co-authored by Nik Gowing and Chris Langdon, and published by John Catt Educational Ltd www.johncatt.com. The book is the latest stage in an ongoing, dynamic project that started in 2014. Please become an active contributor or participant for the ongoing research on leadership. We want to hear your views on leadership. Please engage with your own experiences and insights, especially if you are a leader. You can contribute at www. thinkunthink.org

