I recently sat down with Mike James Ross, a leadership consultant at Egon Zehnder in Montreal, to discuss what he calls the end of resilience.
It’s a bold claim, especially given how much ink has been spilled about resilience as the essential leadership quality. Boards praise it. HR departments train for it. CEOs reference it in earnings calls. But Ross makes a compelling argument that our focus on resilience is not just outdated, it’s actually holding us back.
Ross joined Egon Zehnder following a career as a finance lawyer, private equity investor, startup founder, McKinsey consultant, and senior executive at La Maison Simons.At Egon Zehnder, whose mission is to “discover, develop, and transform leaders,” Ross specializes in individual coaching and working with teams of senior leaders in some of Canada and the world’s most impactful companies.
His argument rests partly on new data. In Egon Zehnder’s recent CEO Response survey of more than 1,200 global CEOs, leaders were asked whether they agreed that, as CEOs, they need to cultivate unprecedented levels of adaptability in themselves and their teams. 92% said yes.
“I don’t know who the 8% are that are saying ‘no, I don’t have to do that’,” Ross laughs.
But the headline for leaders isn’t the 92% agreement. It’s what they’re admitting. Adaptability is no longer a competitive advantage. It’s table stakes. And not incremental adaptability, but the kind that goes beyond anything they previously imagined.
Why Resilience Won’t Cut It Anymore
Ross doesn’t mince words about why resilience has outlived its usefulness.
“Who here believes that resilience is the key to success?” he asks audiences when giving talks on this subject. “Everybody raises their hand. And I say, you’re right, but you’re 10 years out of date.”
He argues that resilience, by definition, implies returning to a prior state after disruption. But in today’s environment, he says, there is no longer a prior state to return to.
The metaphor he uses is vivid: “Imagine I’m at the beach and there’s a wave coming. I hunker down and brace myself. The wave passes over me, and I get up thinking, wow, I’m resilient. However there’s another wave right behind that one, and the challenge now is that the waves are bigger than they’ve ever been, and they’re coming faster than ever. If your goal is to withstand this onslaught of change, you’ll ultimately fail,” says Ross.
“The more interesting approach,” he continues, “is to grab a surfboard and jump into the waves — that’s adaptability. It’s not about withstanding change. It’s about thriving on it, building on it, running with it — using the wave to advance your own objectives.”
When Change Becomes A Business Objective
Amazon is an example of how some companies are reframing their identity.
In his 2025 shareholder letter, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy emphasized that Amazon must operate like “the world’s largest startup,” stripping away bureaucracy and accelerating decision-making to preserve speed at scale. He invited employees to flag internal red tape and reinforced the company’s long-standing “Day 1” philosophy, which prioritizes experimentation and constant reinvention.
The move reflects a strategic posture where change is not episodic but embedded in the way that business is done. Amazon is not simply responding to disruption. It is organizing around it.
Spotting Adaptability in Hiring
If adaptability is now the leadership currency, hiring practices need to evolve.
So, how do you identify adaptable people? Among other suggestions, Ross challenges conventional wisdom about “jumpy” resumes.
“Historically, I think a lot of people, when looking at a resume that had all sorts of different experiences, would say, ‘oof, they’re a bit jumpy. Can’t hold a job down. Can’t see something through.’ I think we need to reframe that.”
The key question to ask: “Why is it that that person is changing so much? Maybe that person is highly adaptable, very high tolerance for ambiguity, comes into an organization, has this hockey stick of learning, and gets bored.”
For younger candidates, Ross suggests looking for joint degrees, especially ones that show a range of interests—business and psychology, engineering and theatre. Or folks who have lived in other countries and speak multiple languages.
“You’re looking for people who can approach problems from multiple angles,” Ross says. “People who draw from very different frameworks to solve problems.”
There’s solid research backing that up. A long-cited study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that groups composed of diverse problem-solvers can outperform groups made up of the highest-ability but homogeneous thinkers because varied perspectives broaden the range of solutions considered.
Studies on global experience paint a similar picture for multicultural leadership. Research from MIT’s Sloan School of Management shows that leaders with multicultural exposure — such as living and working in different countries — tend to communicate more effectively, adapt their style to diverse teams, and drive higher performance when leading teams.
Ross agrees.
“People who have moved around when they were young, maybe they’ve immigrated to this country,” he says. “They see the same problem from different perspectives.”
It’s more than a feel-good idea. In today’s interconnected economy, leaders who can integrate disparate viewpoints and navigate ambiguity tend to unlock better solutions and adapt faster at scale.
Building Adaptability as a Discipline
For Ross, adaptability isn’t a personality trait. It’s a trainable skill — one that organizations and individuals can deliberately strengthen.
“Stop posting roles, start posting challenges,” he says. “A job description that says ‘every day you’re going to come in and you’re going to punch the clock and you do these three things’ is no longer a useful thing to post. More helpful is a description of the challenges that candidates will get to tackle in the job.”
The shift is subtle but consequential: structure work around evolving problems, not static responsibilities. By doing this you will attract more adaptable applicants, and will also train your current employees to think in this new way.
At the individual level, he advocates building adaptability like a muscle. “If you walk the same way to work every day, try taking a different direction. Try brushing your teeth with the other hand.” For executives, the principle scales upward. “If you’re an executive team and you have a weekly meeting, I’m willing to bet that everybody sits in the same chair. Shift it up a little bit. Force people to have the meeting in another place, have the meeting outside, have the meeting while walking.”
These exercises aren’t gimmicks. They’re cognitive conditioning — small disruptions that increase comfort with uncertainty.
More fundamentally, Ross ties adaptability to intellectual humility. “What have you learned in the last five years? What have you changed your mind on in the last five years are very interesting questions to ask yourself and potential applicants.”
His own career reflects that philosophy. From finance law to McKinsey to retail executive to leadership consultant, he has repeatedly shifted arenas.
But even he acknowledges that sustained adaptability requires counterbalance. “As with a lot of things. You’ve got to be able to play the game at very different speeds. For me part of the way in which I allow myself to be so change forward is because I have stability in other parts of my life.”
In Ross’s framing, adaptability is not chaos. It is structured discomfort: practiced intentionally, anchored by stability, and reinforced over time.
The AI Factor
And when it comes to adaptability, we’d be remiss not to mention one of the era’s biggest workplace game-changers: AI.
“Do I use AI in my work? Always. Using AI is no longer an option,” says Ross, who highlights how firms like Egon Zehnder and McKinsey & Company, are starting to evaluate AI competencies in their hiring processes.
“In terms of the day‑to‑day of how people work and what they do, technological change is everything,” says Ross — a stance that reflects broader shifts in consulting and corporate workflows as firms embed AI into knowledge access, research, and synthesis.
The Bottom Line
Ross’s core message is both challenging and liberating: “Resilience presupposes that there’s a return to normal. And I don’t think that that’s happening anymore.”
The good news? Humans are wired for this.
“I believe that part of being human is to be productive in some way and to exert yourself against the world,” he says. “And it’s a natural condition of humankind to want to learn new things, to want to progress.”
The question isn’t whether change will continue to accelerate, because it will. The question is whether we’ll hunker down against the waves or grab a surfboard and ride them to wherever they’re taking us next.
By Karl Moore
Source: forbes.com
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