“So much has been blown up. You can’t put the genie back in the bottle,” said the Guardian’s economics editor, Heather Stewart, after her week in Davos. She also described the week as “unusually alive”.
As the delegates start to leave the Swiss Alps, I want to emphasise another point she made: that the World Economic Forum isn’t just about world leaders. Although geopolitics has dominated this year — not least because there were some huge egos in the room – it is also a place “…to exchange ideas, business cards and do deals,” she says.
Nervous but focussed
While many are feeling understandably jittery – some probably feel like they’ve been walloped with a sledgehammer – there will also be many who come away from Davos with a renewed sense of purpose.
The transformation of the world order is well under way, and for those of us who take a people-centric approach, this is a moment of opportunity: a chance to raise up businesses – and countries and continents – that have too often sat on the periphery.
“…A hard interrogation of what has worked and what hasn’t is not just healthy, but essential.”
I don’t want the genie back in its bottle. In fact, I think a hard interrogation of what has worked and what hasn’t is not just healthy, but essential. This is true of any meaningful transformation. You can’t set a path and then doggedly stick to it when evidence, context and lived experience tell you there are better alternatives.
Keeping conversations going
Over the years, I’ve seen strategies fail not because they were wrong at the outset, but because leaders refused to revisit them. The organisations that thrive are the ones that keep talking – with their teams, with their partners, and with themselves.
We’ve seen this before. When Microsoft began its cultural reset a decade ago, the real shift wasn’t a product launch or a rebrand, but a change in how the organisation communicated. Leadership made space for learning, challenge and feedback – internally and externally – and, crucially, allowed strategy to evolve rather than be defended. That willingness to keep the conversation going, and to change course without ego, proved transformational.
Rupture or redirection?
Five or ten years from now, I suspect we’ll look back on this period less as a moment of rupture and more as a moment of redirection. In a world where certainty is increasingly scarce, agility will have
become the most important currency of all – more valuable than scale, dominance or even capital. The institutions and businesses that emerge stronger won’t be the loudest or the most forceful, but the most adaptive: those that learned quickly, listened constantly, and invested in trust, capability and long-term resilience rather than clinging to rigid plans and short-term advantage.
“In a world where certainty is increasingly scarce, agility will have become the most important currency of all – more valuable than scale, dominance or even capital.”
Those who stay on an increasingly narrow path, even as far more viable options open up to the left and right, often do so out of ego (perhaps rooted in fear) and nothing else. Instead, we need a more organic approach to transformation.
Speaking specifically about trade, the head of the International Monetary Fund, Kristalina Georgieva, said something at Davos that really resonated with me: “We have always traded and we will always trade. Trade is like a river, water. You put obstacle, it goes around it.” The clashes at Davos are not ruptures, but boulders fallen into a river that perhaps had become too shallow, too wide and choked with weeds. It won’t be the shouty strongmen who reshape the riverbed with their shovels, but those who have spent the week meeting, talking, sharing ideas and making plans. They will start the digging – and others will join.
