On Rosa, resonance and what the conditions actually require of leaders now.
The work most organizations are paying for in 2026 is not the work they actually need.
I do not mean this as a critique of their efforts or the people involved. I mean it as an observation about what has happened to the conditions inside which we are operating. The conditions have shifted. The work has not. The mismatch is producing the symptoms — disengagement, attrition, leadership burnout and the strange spectacle of organizations doing more and accomplishing less.
We have been here before. Every 50 or 60 years, the environment shifts enough that the existing model of leadership development stops working. The 1950s training paradigm, born of industrial work, failed in the knowledge era. The 1990s competency frameworks paradigm is failing now. We do not need a better version of the old paradigm. We need a different orientation entirely.
The Case for a Different Paradigm
The German sociologist Hartmut Rosa has spent two decades studying what he calls social acceleration. [1] His argument is that modern society has been accelerating in three distinct ways: technological speed, the pace of social change and the pace of everyday life. We were promised these accelerations would produce freedom. They have not. They have produced what Rosa calls alienation — a felt disconnection between our self and the world that no amount of optimization can resolve.
Leaders in 2026 are inside this alienation as deeply as anyone. They are moving faster than they ever have. They are processing more information. They are making more decisions. And by their own report, they are connecting less, leading less effectively and experiencing less meaning in their work than they did a decade ago.
Rosa’s prescription is not deceleration. He does not argue that we slow down. He argues for what he calls resonance, or a different relationship between our self and the world in which neither is reduced to the other. Resonance [2] is what acceleration has been displacing. It is the sense that we are in actual contact with the situations we are experiencing. We feel them on an emotional, cognitive and physical level, and those situations are speaking back to us. The leader in resonance is not just acting on a situation. The situation is also acting on her. Both are being transformed.
This is what transformation actually means. Not improvement. Not change management. The leader and the situation altering each other through genuine connection.
Three Conditions Shaping our Environment
Three conditions are converging in a way they have not before.
The first is technological. AI is collapsing the value of work that can be packaged as content delivery — things like frameworks, slide decks, competency maps and even training modules. Brynjolfsson, Li and Raymond (2023) documented the compression of output distribution [3]. Whatever your stakeholders have been buying as “content” can increasingly be purchased elsewhere, possibly for fractions of what you charge.
The second is psychological. We are watching the largest cohort of mid-career and senior leaders in history operating under conditions of sustained burnout. The World Health Organization classified burnout as an occupational phenomenon in 2019 [4] (WHO, 2019). Gallup’s 2025 data showed employee engagement at near-historic lows since 2020 [5]. The widely cited figure that 70% of organizational transformations fail [6] (McKinsey, 2015) is not really a story about strategy. It is a story about whether leaders themselves can sustain transformation through their own depleted systems.
The third is structural. The institutions inside which most knowledge work happens — places including corporations, consulting firms, training departments and certification bodies — were built for a different set of conditions. They are now over-fitted to the conditions of the late twentieth century and under-fit for the conditions of 2026.
These three pressures are not separable. They are converging. And together they are producing a single fact:
The conventional approach to leadership development is no longer sufficient.
Not because practitioners are wrong. Because the work being asked of leaders has changed in kind, not in degree.
A New Paradigm of Leadership Development
This is the work that is being called for now.
It’s calling for transformation in leaders themselves, inside their lives and their work. Leaders who can return to duration [7] when conditions force them out of it. Leaders who can sustain resonance with their teams, their organizations and the situations they lead in. Leaders who can be transformed by what they encounter, not just navigate around it.
This is not aspirational language. It is what the present moment is demanding. Organizations that can produce this kind of leadership will outperform those that cannot. It’s not because they have better strategies. It’s because their leaders will still be functioning as leaders five years from now.
The community of practitioners who have been working at this edge for a long time — some of you have known what you were doing, some of you have suspected, some of you have struggled to name it — are the ones the moment is asking for. The work you have been quietly developing has just become essential.
Three Steps to Meet this Moment
1. Audit what your clients or co-workers are actually buying from you.
Look at your last five engagements. Were they primarily content delivery (frameworks, models, processes)? Or were they primarily transformation (changes in how the leader or the team is inside their work)? The ratio is data. The shift the moment requires is in the direction of the second category.
2. Have one conversation this month about what your client or co-workers actually need.
Not what they hired you to do. What is actually in front of them, and what kind of help would truly support them. The conversation will be uncomfortable. You may not know how to solve it. It is also where the next chapter of your work begins.
3. Study one leader who is functioning well under these conditions.
Not a celebrity case study. Someone you actually work with or know. What are they doing differently? What kind of practice has produced their capacity? The answer is rarely what the leadership literature predicts. It is closer to what you have been training all along.
Ready to meet this moment? Associates: Join us at Elevate on June 24-25 in Denver, Colorado. Fill out the form below to connect with our team.
References
Brynjolfsson, E., Li, D., & Raymond, L. R. (2023). Generative AI at work (NBER Working Paper No. 31161). National Bureau of Economic Research. https://doi.org/10.3386/w31161
Gallup. (2024). State of the global workplace: 2024 report. Gallup, Inc.
McKinsey & Company. (2015). Changing change management. McKinsey Quarterly.
Rosa, H. (2013). Social acceleration: A new theory of modernity (J. Trejo-Mathys, Trans.). Columbia University Press.
Rosa, H. (2019). Resonance: A sociology of our relationship to the world (J. C. Wagner, Trans.). Polity Press.
World Health Organization. (2019, May 28). Burn-out an “occupational phenomenon”: International Classification of Diseases.
This piece was developed in conversation with Claude, an AI assistant made by Anthropic. The clinical material, the lived observations, and the voice are my own.
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