Built to Shift: A playbook for downturns

The COVID era and past economic downturns taught leaders how to navigate through crisis: make fast decisions, protect the core, reallocate resources, and communicate constantly. Many of those instincts still serve leaders well today.

But 2025 presents a different kind of pressure.

What’s different:

 
• No shared “shock event”: Unlike COVID, there’s no singular catalyst. The global disruption is distributed—tech acceleration, economic shifts, geopolitical turmoil, and workforce evolution all happening at once.
 
• Fatigue is deeper: This isn’t the first wave of change. Employees and leaders are tired. Resilience reserves are low, and trust is harder to rebuild.
 
• The talent landscape has changed: Hybrid expectations, new career norms, AI anxiety, and burnout have redefined what people need from work and what they'll walk away from.
 
• Change is the default now: In 2020, disruption felt temporary. In 2025, it’s clear that constant transformation is the new normal and many systems weren’t built to sustain it.
 
• AI is rewriting roles in real time: It’s not just automation or cost-cutting. It’s rethinking how work gets done, who does it, and what creates value in the first place.

What’s similar:

 
• High uncertainty: Just like during COVID, the path forward isn’t clear and it’s shifting quickly.
 
• Accelerated change: Companies are once again reinventing strategy, structure, and ways of working, sometimes all at once, and in an equally shifting global landscape.
 
• Pressure on leadership: People are looking for direction, clarity, and stability in a volatile environment.
 
• Urgency to act boldly: Playing it safe isn’t an option. Bold moves are still what differentiate winners from laggards.

What companies learned in past crises still matters, but the playbook needs an upgrade. The challenge now isn’t just adapting once. It’s building an organization that can keep adapting without losing energy, clarity, or cohesion.

This playbook lays out the four high-leverage moves senior leaders are using to guide their organizations through today’s complexity and build long-term momentum in the process. Each move is designed to help you challenge assumptions, activate your team, and make the bold shifts that relevance and resilience require.

This draws on lessons from past downturns, including COVID, but applies them with a new lens. In 2020, the shock was sudden and shared. Today, the pressure is persistent and compounding. There's no single moment of crisis, just a constant churn of variables. And that makes discipline, imagination, resilience, and team readiness even more essential.