Leading through volatility is now the most in-demand skill at U.S. companies (topping AI fluency), according to dozens of senior human resources executives I polled recently at Fortune 100 companies from an array of industries, including healthcare, sales, finance, food service, manufacturing, tech, and biotech. The demand has been driven by recent spikes in global uncertainty, technological disruption, and economic instability.
But in this unpredictable new world, organizations are falling short at training people how to lead. The $50 billion executive education sector—as Warren Bennis first pointed out in his 1961 HBR article “A Revisionist Theory of Leadership”—has tended to conflate leadership with management. As a result, executive education is good at helping people improve management skills such as accounting, active listening, and data-driven decision making. Yet it hasn’t developed a comparably rich curriculum for cultivating initiative, strategic vision, and the other skills needed to lead in volatility.
There is one organization, however, that has spent more than seven decades creating exactly that curriculum. The U.S. Army Special Operations has taught tens of thousands of soldiers who excel at managerial tasks (such as maintaining standards and optimizing operations) to successfully take on leadership tasks (such as seizing opportunities and launching innovations). It has done so by creating training pipelines, centered at the JFK Special Warfare Center and School, in North Carolina, that guide recruits through rigorously assessed experiential-learning exercises.
Those exercises have never been incorporated into business school or private education coursework—partly because they’re secret, but also because they’re extremely specialized, relying on tasks and environments particular to elite combat units. Over the past four years, however, my lab at Ohio State has worked with the Army to convert its Special Ops curriculum into a general method of leadership training that has been transferred into the Medical Corps, the Corps of Engineers, Logistics, Military Intelligence, and other Army sectors. And with the help of Army Special Operators, my lab has also translated the method into business settings, transitioning managers into leaders at companies of all sizes in a variety of industries.
In this article, I’ll describe how you can develop leadership like Special Ops. First, I’ll explain what distinguishes the Special Ops curriculum from traditional executive education: namely, experiential exercises that coach the brain to learn from failure. Next, I’ll share what Special Ops has identified as the four main reasons for leadership failure—and how to correct them. Finally, I’ll lay out a “Simulated Failure” exercise for scaling Special Ops training across your organization, equipping every manager to lead in volatility.
How Special Ops Trains Leadership
According to internal Army assessments, recruits who completed Special Ops training between 2005 and 2020 had a leadership success rate of more than 90%. That success was measured on multiple scales, including:
- Integrity
- Mental agility
- Sound judgment
- Innovation
- Leads by example
- Develops others
- Gets results (defined as “developing and executing plans while providing direction, guidance, and clear priorities towards mission accomplishment”)
Why was the training so effective? Special Ops lacked a satisfactory theory—and seeking one, they contacted my lab in 2021. During the next three years we worked closely with the Army, guided by, among others, Lieutenant Colonel Tom Gaines (Special Operations Command), Lieutenant Colonel Christopher J. Haviley (JFK Special Warfare Center and School), Sergeant Major Matt Jackson (Special Operations), and Dr. Brittany Loney (Special Operations).
Together, we determined that Army Special Ops curriculum differs from current business leadership training in two key ways: technique and focus.
Technique
Special Ops training goes beyond classroom reflections on case studies and conceptual frameworks. Instead, it provides controlled exercises in failure that give students the experience of learning from simulated failures based on stressful real-world leadership situations, such as:
- The sudden loss of critical resources or infrastructure
- Fresh information that fundamentally contradicts prior datapoints
- Major transitions in senior personnel
- The abrupt failure of long-established procedures or strategies
- Aggressively innovative competitors
- Compelling new ideas that may be transformational opportunities or dangerous boondoggles.
These situations are collectively defined by an Army coinage that is also common in the business world: VUCA (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, Ambiguity).
Focus
Special Ops doesn’t equate leadership with influence. Influence is the capacity to organize and direct the behavior of others, making it the foundation of what business schools and consultancies refer to as transformational leadership (along with other styles of leadership).
Special Ops has found, however, that leadership requires mental skills that precede influence. “Influence is a management task,” one operator told me. “Before you can exert influence, or perform any other management task that organizes a team to do something, a leader needs to figure out what something the team should do.”
The fundamental characteristic of a leader is, in short, the ability to respond to new situations with new plans. New plans don’t have a formula, of course; that’s why they’re new. But when a leadership failure occurs, it’s typically for one of four reasons.
The Four Reasons for Leadership Failure—and How to Address Them
As Special Ops has learned from years of leading in VUCA, new plans are launched by initiative, sustained by emotional confidence, multiplied by imagination, and focused by strategic vision. If leadership breaks down, the root cause is thus usually a failure in one of these four processes.
Within business settings, failures of initiative and emotional confidence are more prevalent in managers who are new to leadership tasks; failures of imagination and strategic vision are more prevalent in managers on the cusp of being promoted to an executive level.
Here’s how to diagnose and fix these failures.
1. Failure of Initiative
- Special Ops Name: The Fear Box
- Diagnostic Indicators: Blank mind, freezing, submissiveness, helplessness
- Root Cause: A leader has no plan for dealing with a situation
VUCA causes stress, which activates the brain’s threat response, aka fight-or-flight, triggering fear. Fear evolved because the brain has learned, from millions of years of grappling with volatility, that planning must accelerate to match the rate of change. If you can’t spin up your planning fast enough, fear therefore intercedes to provide its own plan, which is typically either to escape the situation or to copy what people around you are doing, solving the problem of no plan by borrowing a plan from others. This is why fear makes us vulnerable to outside influence.
Solution 1: Make a “hasty plan.” In combat, Special Operators exit fear by making a hasty plan, which is the quickest first step they can take toward a target. That first step gets the brain’s planning mechanisms moving, gathering impetus to meet the pace of events.
You can practice this in a business setting by using a quiet moment to write down a concrete near-term goal, like communicating better to your team, or reaching out to new clients. The next time you hit VUCA at work, ask yourself: Given this unexpected situation, what simple action can I still take to advance my goal? Take that action immediately. Once you have your brain engaged in active planning, shift focus onto the situation itself, engaging leadership skills such as imagination and strategic vision (discussed later in this article).
Solution 2: Choose your own advisor. Start by identifying a leader you respect and research how they handled a challenging leadership situation. For example, you could read their memoirs or interview them in person.
When you encounter challenges in your own life, ask yourself: What would that leader do? This process shifts your brain’s attention from its personal stress onto an outside possibility, encouraging mental motion.
In VUCA, if you can’t imagine what your chosen leader would do, call on a nearby colleague to give you advice. Even though the advice is theirs, the choice of whom to call is yours, so this technique is a quick way for you to get your planning motor going. Remember: You don’t have to take the person’s advice—your purpose in soliciting it is to kick your own planning into drive, leaving fear behind. So, if the advice prompts you to think of a different plan, go in your own direction.
Key Takeaway: Initiative gets you out of the Fear Box by providing what fear wants—a plan.
2. Failure of Emotional Confidence
- Special Ops Name: Flashback Quit
- Diagnostic Indicators: Hesitation, self-doubt, unproductive anxiety, shame
- Root Cause: A leader has a plan—but lacks confidence to try it
Hesitation is a learned behavior. It’s triggered by memories of failure (or perceived failure) that suffuse the brain with shame. Shame makes you think: I am useless. And when past shame surfaces in the present, it makes you think: Here we go again. I am going to mess this up, just like I did before.
Shame isn’t inherently bad; it evolved to prompt us to learn from our missteps. But shame is so psychologically powerful that it can be counterproductive in VUCA, especially for young leaders.
Solution 1: Emotion reset. To brace your confidence against unexpected shocks, recall an occasion when you responded effectively to an instance of volatility or uncertainty. Prime the memory in your brain by writing down everything you remember about the event, vividly visualizing each detail, including every step of your response plan. This process outfits your brain with a positive flashback to counter negative flashbacks you might experience during a leadership challenge.
When you encounter VUCA, before you do anything else, take a moment to recall your positive memory, activating confidence in your brain. This technique is used by Special Operators during combat. In trials run by my lab on corporate managers, it produced substantially less hesitation during leadership challenges.
Solution 2: Eat your demons. Review your past for moments of failure that prompt strong feelings of shame. Assign each moment to one of two buckets:
- Room for personal improvement. Shame goes in this bucket if you reflect on the moment and think, I could have done better. Make a plan for what you should have done instead and commit to executing it next time.
- Other people judged wrong. Shame goes in this bucket if you realize that other people wrongly criticized you for an appropriate action. Fffirm yourself for doing what was right, reminding yourself that leaders walk independent from the crowd.
By proactively reviewing these moments, you’ll reduce the likelihood that they’ll resurface during your next leadership challenge. You’ll also gain strength from shame, turning it from hindrance into sustenance.
Key Takeaway: The brain believes its memories of success because it has lived them, so by strengthening those memories in advance, you equip yourself with the emotional confidence to overcome Flashback Quit.
3. Failure of Imagination
- Special Ops Name: Captain Rightman
- Diagnostic Indicators: Anger, irritation, impatience, evading responsibility
- Root Cause: A leader has a plan—but only one plan
Anger is fear’s partner. In the brain’s threat response, it is the fight. Fight isn’t bad; leaders benefit from hanging tough in VUCA. Anger, however, is almost always a sign of a leadership failure.
When the brain has only one plan, anger thinks, I need to push this plan forward with everything I’ve got, because my only other option is fear. Unless you happen to be in a life-and-death emergency with zero seconds to spare, anger is the wrong approach.
Your other option is to take a moment to create a second plan. A second plan gives you operational flexibility, ensuring that if your first plan breaks, you can maintain initiative. This calms your brain, allowing you to act assertively without shouting, bullying, or burning out your team.
Solution 1: Develop the planner, not the plan. The purpose of planning isn’t to develop a plan. It’s to develop the planner. No plan, regardless how brilliant or evidence-based, survives contact with reality—but a good planner can always exploit the future’s unexpected twists.
Become that planner by proactively planning and replanning: Create detailed plans for potential futures, make contingency plans for currently optimal operations, and devise counterfactual plans for past initiatives that could have worked better.
If you ever grow emotionally attached to a plan, remember that whenever new crises or opportunities appear, good leaders throw out the plans they’ve made, knowing that the real purpose of making those plans was prepare the brain to create better plans now.
Solution 2: Go beyond probabilities into possibilities. Probabilities are events that can be statistically quantified because they’ve occurred multiple times before. Possibilities are events that could happen but never have. When the brain focuses on probabilities, it starts to believe that there’s one best plan; when the brain focuses on possibilities, it perceives that there can be many viable paths to success.
To shift yourself into thinking in possibilities, imagine the mainstreaming of a near-future technology—stem-cell therapies that can reverse aging, perhaps, or highways that can wirelessly charge electric vehicles while driving. This disrupts your priors, encouraging you to exit probability.
Then ask yourself: What initiatives could my organization launch to take advantage of this tech revolution? After you’ve used sci fi to open up your mind to fresh possibilities, you’ll be primed to mull more immediate questions: What never-before events could occur at work today? Tomorrow? Next week?
Key Takeaway: By increasing possible plans, imagination eliminates the inflexibility that produces Captain Rightman’s anger, frustration, and intolerance.
4. Failure of Strategic Vision
- Special Ops Name: The Headless General
- Diagnostic Indicators: Disorganization, contradictory directives, excessive attention to minor details, self-pity.
- Root Cause: A leader has multiple plans—yet lacks a global objective.
Disorganization occurs when you’re better at tactics than at strategy—in other words, when you’re a creative problem-solver but haven’t developed the ability to prioritize a single long-term goal.
Lacking that goal, your attention wanders in response to short-term challenges and opportunities. You issue contradictory directives. You troubleshoot reactively rather than leading with drive. You become so focused on what’s happening now that you start believing that you’re necessary for everything, falling into megalomania, micromanagement, and self-pity.
Solution 1: Target victory. List all the successes you want your organization to achieve over the next five years. Then identify a single ambitious goal that, if you hit it, will enable you to achieve most (even all) of those successes. That goal is your definition of victory.
Victory is bold and specific—a precise target that is hard but possible to attain. When leaders fail to define victory, it’s usually because their target is either bold but not specific (Double profits in four years) or specific but not bold (Update product X).
A defined victory, by contrast, is bold and specific: Develop the first tumor-agnostic cancer drug (Merck); build a personal computer that actually feels personal (Apple); put a man on the moon (NASA). Keep victory top of mind whenever you encounter VUCA, and you can fully engage tactical creativity without losing strategic direction.
Solution 2: Distinguish familiar stress from new stress. When projects hitch or fall behind schedule, stress increases, prompting leaders to leap into action. But this leap can be an overreaction that introduces confusion into operations, adding to the problem instead of alleviating it.
To avoid overreaction, analyze your stress, determining whether it’s familiar or new. Familiar stress is caused by problems that have occurred before; new stress by problems that haven’t. New stress can only be resolved by new plans, which are your responsibility as a leader; familiar stress can be resolved by employing the solution that worked last time, which is what managers are there for. So only get involved when stress is new. If the stress is familiar, ignore the problem and trust your managers to handle it, keeping your focus on your organization’s long-term strategy.
Key Takeaway: By providing a bold but specific target that focuses planning during VUCA, strategic vision preempts the chaotic meddling of the Headless General.
Develop a Leadership Readiness Program
Once you know the four reasons for leadership failure, you can learn more effectively from experience, you can review your past leadership missteps to remedy their root causes, and you can adapt faster when VUCA interrupts existing plans.
And your own personal development is just the beginning. Like Special Ops, you can scale the training, providing it to managers across your organization. That’s because you don’t need to sit around waiting for VUCA to strike. You can simulate failure in a learning environment, averting real-life calamities and proactively creating leaders, by developing what Special Ops calls a leadership readiness program. Here’s how:
Recruit cadre.
Cadre are members of your organization who have two years or more of experience in senior leadership roles (the equivalent of VP level or above), have been involved in at least one successful major initiative, and have weathered at least one serious crisis. It’s the cadre’s job to plan and execute the training, and to counsel and assess the students.
They can be retired—in fact, recently retired leaders often make the best cadre. You must have at least two cadre in any training, so that students can be provided with at least two perspectives. A good ratio of cadre to students is 1:5.
Create a catalogue of training scenarios.
Convene cadre to write down every serious leadership crisis or opportunity that they have experienced or witnessed. This might involve any number of situations: a failed initiative; a major merger; a disruptive competitor; new regulations; big market shifts; systemic supply chain problems; a promising new product or service; the loss of a major client; the departure of a key leader; conflict between essential personnel; a budgetary surplus; a fatal accident; discovery of internal fraud; a longshot research possibility; a PR disaster.
After your cadre have compiled a list of past scenarios, have them imagine a list of potential near-future scenarios your organization might realistically face. Each scenario (past and near-future) should be short enough to be presented on a single 3×5 notecard or PowerPoint slide. It doesn’t need to contain all the information about the situation. In fact, it’s better if it contains very little information, since leadership situations are murky and change fast. Specific details can be provided (or improvised) by cadre during training.
The goal is not to hand students a logically designed puzzle with an elegant optimum solution. It is to elicit psychological stress, giving students the opportunity to generate new plans under pressure. This means that there should never be one right answer to a scenario. Instead, every scenario should provide students with the experience of doing what leaders do: Inventing and testing possible plans in ongoing uncertainty and volatility.
Examples of effective training scenarios include:
- You’ve just lost your biggest client to your biggest competitor, reducing annual revenue by 10%. What’s your next move?
- Your division is projected to double its profits over the next three years. What do you do with the additional capital?
- Due to a recent acquisition, 10% of your senior managers now have fewer than three direct reports. What do you do about your organizational structure?
- Legacy sales are holding steady but no one is buying your new product line. What’s your strategy?
You should have 20 of these kinds of scenarios to run the program, but more is always better, because a large catalogue of varied scenarios increases the experience of VUCA. Each time the program is repeated, take the opportunity to expand and refresh the catalogue with new scenarios.
Enroll students.
Invite managers across your organization to enroll as students in a leadership-readiness program. The invitation should be inclusive, because leaders can come from all ranks and any sector. Enrollment must be voluntary, because the first step in becoming a leader is to choose to take the step. If you notice that parts of your organization are underrepresented or that a manager with leadership potential is not volunteering, ask a cadre member to encourage participation.
Run a Simulated Failure Exercise
Now that you’ve got students, cadre, and a catalogue of training exercises, you’re ready to simulate failure.
In the center of a midsize room, preferably without windows, place a table. At the table, seat two to five cadre. (More cadre are better, if you have them.) Behind the cadre, convene a seated audience. The audience does not need to be large but it should be emotionally significant to the students. It might contain members of their peer group, respected senior members of the organization, previous graduates of the leadership-readiness program, or even personal friends and family. The audience’s main purpose is to increase the psychological pressure on the student. (Its minor purpose is to provide an outside perspective on the training, so that cadre can get feedback on their own performance.) If possible, add ambient distractors, such as screens tuned to different newsfeeds.
Invite a student to enter the room. Have them face the cadre. Inform the student that they can choose to end the exercise at any time, without stigma. Tell them that leaders all experience failure, which is honored here as an opportunity to develop strength and wisdom.
Present the student with a training scenario. To provide verisimilitude and emotional grip, the scenario should be tailored on the spot by cadre to the student’s specific experience and organizational role. For example, cadre could tailor the scenario: “You have just lost [specific member of your team] to [specific competitor].” Or: “You have just discovered that [specific product] has been downloaded twice as many times as projected, doubling revenue.”
Once the student has been presented with the scenario, invite them to propose a plan. Then have the cadre challenge it. Cadre should not challenge the plan by presenting hypothetical objections. Instead, cadre should directly inform the student: Your plan has resulted in [this negative outcome]. For example, if a student proposes using a budget surplus to hire more salesforce, cadre could inform the student that the new hires did not increase sales enough to cover the salary expenditure. Cadre should be specific about the negative outcome. For example, if the student says, “I would then eliminate the new sales positions,” cadre could say, “That created a crisis of confidence in the remaining sales team, and your top two salespeople [X and Y] resigned.”
The purpose of the cadre’s challenges is to diagnose how the student responds to pressurized open-ended situations. Effective leadership is indicated by the ability to respond promptly to all challenges with new and potentially viable plans, demonstrating that the student possesses the four leadership skills discussed above: initiative, emotional confidence, imagination, and strategic vision. If a student displays effective leadership during the first scenario, provide them with another scenario. If the student succeeds again, provide them with a third.
If cadre challenge the student with multiple specific negative outcomes, and if the three scenarios are materially distinct, the student will usually experience a failure. However, in the event that the student succeeds at three scenarios, congratulate them on displaying effective leadership. When this occurs, the student should be provided a leadership opportunity within your organization, whether in an existing role or on a startup project.
If, instead, the student displays helplessness, hesitation, irritation, disorganization, or one of the other diagnostic indicators of leadership failure (see “The Four Reasons” above), stop the exercise immediately. Congratulate the student on pushing themselves to failure. Then ask the student to go to another room and perform a “hot wash” in which they write down everything they can remember about the exercise, including the scenario, the cadre’s challenges, and their own responses.
The following day, have the student meet with cadre to review the hot wash. The review’s purpose is to pinpoint the root cause of the leadership failure, helping the student identify which leadership skill—initiative, emotional confidence, imagination, or strategic vision—they should develop next.
To protect student wellbeing, this exercise contains multiple safeguards: the voluntary nature of participation, the emphasis on failure as a good, the multiple cadre to check each other, the audience there to monitor the cadre. But as an additional measure, an experienced HR professional can be on hand to reject unreasonable cadre challenges and to interrupt the exercise promptly if students display helplessness or shame.
To ensure that training is student-centered, cadre should remember: although the exercise’s immediate purpose is to challenge students, its ultimate purpose is to create leaders. When a student produces a plan that contradicts what cadre would have done, cadre should resist the urge to criticize or correct the student. Instead, cadre should disinterestedly consider whether the plan is feasible. If it is, cadre should congratulate the student for doing something smart that they wouldn’t have done. This technique fosters leaders, because leadership is, at root, acting intelligently—and independently.
Next Steps
Leadership skills are strengthened through practice. That practice can take place during simulated failure exercises. (Two exercises a year is an effective tempo for most organizations.) But it can also be organic to the workday. To engage in workday practice, managers should monitor themselves for anger, shame, and the other diagnostic indicators of leadership failure—then employ a recommended Special Ops solution (like “Make a Hasty Plan” or “Target Victory”).
If managers struggle with stress during training, here’s a Special Ops tip: Have gratitude for crisis, chaos, broken plans, nasty surprises, missed objectives, unreasonable expectations, team conflict, friendly fire, and the other progeny of volatility. They’re providing an opportunity to lead, handing you the chance to create a better future. This mental shift inhibits rumination, exasperation, resentment, and other counterproductive psychological responses to stress.
The stress-enriched training of Special Ops might seem unsuitable for executive education. But real-life business is saturated with powerful stressors, and there’s no more effective way to prepare the brain than through simulated failures punctuated with supportive coaching. In a world where VUCA is inevitable, better to learn its psychological pressures via structured exercises than to be suddenly forced to sink or swim on the job.
Volatility and uncertainty can strike at any moment without warning. To prepare themselves for that moment, aspiring leaders must develop the initiative, emotional confidence, imagination, and strategic vision to create new plans. These leadership skills are all best cultivated via experiential training.
Experiential training is irregular, nonlinear, and unpredictable, which can make it feel chaotic, inefficient, and arbitrary. But that’s the point. Experiential training prepares the brain for VUCA by itself being volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous—in controlled doses that enable intentional skill building.
Because experiential training cannot be smoothly automated by instructors or mastered in advance by students, it requires more patience, openness, and faith than managerial coursework. But it works—at scale. The training described in this article has been added to the core curriculum of the U.S. Army’s Command and General Staff College, which annually trains more than 1000 mid-career officers. According to Richard McConnell, a professor of tactics charged with evaluating the training, two hours of training yielded on average a 10% improvement in leadership skills. Equivalent or higher ROIs have been reported by Fortune 500 companies that have deployed the training on populations of 100 or more managers. Many of these companies now use the training annual leadership programs for senior managers, and one Fortune 50 has made it available to its entire mid-level management team.
Leadership and management are complementary skills: Once you create the future, you want to guide others to join you. That’s a job that a century’s worth of management theory can help you with. In VUCA, however, that job comes second. To adapt a Special Ops adage: Managers can exploit the peace, but only if leaders have first won the war.