Experience has always mattered in leadership. But with global systems in flux — geopolitically, socially, and economically — experience alone is no longer sufficient.
At the 2026 World Economic Forum in Davos this week, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney delivered a powerful message that captures this moment well: the “old world order is not coming back,” and lingering assumptions about stability, norms, and predictable rules must give way to new strategic thinking if countries and leaders are to thrive.
Carney described the global landscape as a “rupture, not a transition”, emphasizing that reliance on past structures — whether geopolitical, economic, or institutional — is increasingly inadequate in the face of intensifying rivalry, coercive tools like tariffs, and shifting alliances.
In other words: the environment itself has changed — and history alone won’t prepare us for what comes next. In leadership terms, this is a collective version of a dilemma I see in individual leaders and organizations: past experience gives confidence, but it can also give comfort — comfort that no longer matches reality.
Why This Matters to Leaders Everywhere
When a head of government is urging nations to stop longing for the “old order” and instead build something new from the fracture, that’s not geopolitical theatre — that is a leadership challenge writ very large. Carney’s call to middle powers to act with honesty and strategic purpose — not nostalgia — resonates with the world of leadership at every level.
Leaders in organizations, teams, and communities are experiencing similar pressure:
• structures that once provided certainty are now unstable
• previously reliable alliances and patterns are no longer reliable
• the incentives that drove advancement in the past are not delivering results today.
This creates a fundamental tension:
Experience helps leaders interpret the past.
But interpreting the future requires new thinking.
What “New Thinking” Looks Like in Leadership Practice
Carney’s message was clear: to influence outcomes in this new environment, leaders must move beyond familiar assumptions and build strategies grounded in present realities, not old models.
Translated to the leadership realm, that means:
1. Interrogating assumptions, not defaulting to habit.
Experience can anchor us, but it can also blind us to change. Effective leaders challenge their own mental models before the system forces them to.
2. Recognizing complexity without resignation.
Just as Carney notes that the old rules are fading — not because of single actors but because of structural shifts — leaders must acknowledge complexity without becoming passive or reactive.
3. Translating insight into adaptive action.
New thinking isn’t just conceptual — it changes choices and actions. Just as Canada is recalibrating trade, alliances, and investments in response to changed global dynamics, leaders in any organization must align thinking with strategy and execution.
Leadership: From Static Experience to Expansive Capacity
This matters because the stakes are higher than ever. Leaders who rely solely on experience may fail to recognize when conditions that underpinned that experience have shifted. As Carney put it, nostalgia is not a strategy — whether in global policy or in organizational leadership.
This brings us back to an essential truth:
Leading forward requires more than experience — it requires new ways of thinking.
And the willingness to translate that thinking into new choices, new actions, and new ways of leading.
In political, organizational, or societal contexts, the pattern is the same. Systems that once seemed stable have proven less so. The leaders who will thrive are those willing to perceive what the world has become, not what it once was — and then act accordingly.