The Next Next Common Sense
disruptions, leadership deliberately creates “Adaptation Narratives” that highlight how previous periods of uncertainty developed organizational capabilities, reframing current challenges as growth opportunities. These approaches create what psychologist Carol Dweck called “growth mindset”—the belief that capabilities develop through engage- ment with challenge rather than being fixed traits. Developing coherent leadership teams While distributed leadership enables responsiveness throughout the organization, formal leadership teams remain critical in creating the conditions for broader coherence. These teams must themselves embody the coherence they seek to foster, modeling alignment between purpose, communication, and action.
Complementary capability composition
Leadership teams that navigate complexity effectively combine di- verse capabilities in complementary rather than competing patterns. This complementarity enables the team to address multifaceted challenges while maintaining cohesive action. Technology company Microsoft demonstrates this approach through its “Complementary Leadership” model. Rather than seeking uniform capabilities across its senior leadership team, CEO Satya Nadella deliber- ately combines leaders with different strengths—technical depth, market understanding, people development, operational excellence—in patterns that complement rather than duplicate. This complementarity creates what Nadella calls “full-spectrum leadership”—collective capability that exceeds what any individual could provide. Complementary capability composition manifests in several team practices: Capability mapping. Teams explicitly identify strength pat- terns across members rather than assuming uniform capability. When
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