2026 demands business leaders to rethink everything they know about change
As businesses enter 2026, another year of change and disruption lies ahead. According to Andy Walker, CEO of Oliver Wight, the pace of change has become so disruptive, successive and rapid that organisations need to adopt an entirely different perspective on how they drive change and innovation.
Throughout my career, I have consistently seen that strong business leadership is critical to helping organisations unlock growth and deliver on their commitments for the year ahead and beyond. Not the kind of leadership that launches grand programmes and waits for results, but leadership that creates visible progress, builds capability quickly and adapts as circumstances evolve.
Frankly, the old model is broken. We see it constantly: leaders lose patience around year two, technology evolves faster than implementation timelines, and your best people quietly retreat to Excel because they’ve seen this film before. Half of the planning tools go underused. Programmes that looked compelling in the boardroom presentation deliver little on the ground.
Meanwhile, a hangover from the coronavirus pandemic lingers. Companies are still dealing with stock write-offs from inventory accumulated during Covid-19-related disruptions, with warehouses full of products no one wants anymore. The financial cost is staggering, and the environmental cost is worse.
Yet boards keep approving the same multi-year programmes that created those problems in the first place. The post-pandemic stock write-off is a reminder that those organisations that best handle panic will succeed.
Stop setting distant goals and start proving value quickly
There’s an old saying: give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day; teach him to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime. At Oliver Wight, we’ve built our entire approach around that philosophy for over half a century. Unlike consulting firms that parachute in with their own fishing boats, catch everything in sight, and leave you dependent on their return visits, we transfer knowledge to your people. Your team learns to fish, permanently.
But things have changed in the age of artificial intelligence: even teaching someone to fish requires rethinking how businesses operate today. You can’t hand someone a rod, point at the ocean, and say: “You’ll be feeding yourself in three years.” They’ll starve waiting. Or they’ll wander off to the fishmonger because at least that delivers dinner tonight.
Our response has been ‘Method to Meaning’, a shift from frameworks to capability, from strategy to execution. Think of it as teaching someone to catch their first fish within weeks, not years. We prove the logic works in five weeks, run pilots with tangible value in another eight, and enhance and scale once the approach is proven. Two-week update cycles treat improvement as a living system rather than a distant destination.
The principle is this: when people catch fish quickly, they are more likely to commit to learning more. When they’re promised an eventual feast while their stomachs rumble, they quietly head back to the fishmonger and carry on as before. Businesses respond to the same incentives. Quick wins build confidence, while distant visions build cynicism.
Reset before you respond
The chaos facing businesses in 2026 isn’t going away. In 2025, we endured tariff uncertainty, AI disruption, supply chain fragility, and sustainability pressure. But I’ve noticed something interesting in the companies that handle chaos well: they’ve already done the hard work of defining who they are.
This is what I mean by reset. Before you respond to external pressure, you need clarity about your own excellence. What does good look like for your business? What values will guide decisions when there’s no time for deliberation? Companies that answer these questions in advance have a touchstone when a crisis hits. And those who don’t spend precious time arguing about priorities when they should be acting.
Our Enterprise Business Model exists precisely for this purpose: to identify where value is leaking before competitive pressure makes it obvious. Most leaders are surprised by what they find. The inefficiencies aren’t always where they expect. Sales exceeded target, operations reduced costs, supply chain improved service levels, so why didn’t profit improve? Because local optimisation was destroying global value, and nobody had visibility across the whole system.
Make satisfying customers your competitive edge
Another trend I predict in 2026 is that customer service will matter more, not less. In a saturated market where products increasingly look alike, how you serve customers becomes your differentiation. Technology can help, but only if you use AI as an input to better decisions rather than treating it as an outcome in itself.
I’m wary of what I call lemming culture: the rush to implement AI because everyone else is. Decision-makers are getting younger, and they’re more comfortable trusting data. That’s largely positive. But it also means more organisations are deploying technology without asking the fundamental question: what decision does this help us make better?
We’ve been working with Board to offer clients something different, and accelerate the all-important speed to market: partnerships that combine planning capability with technology that genuinely supports how people work. Not systems that demand you change your processes to fit their architecture, but tools that adapt to the decisions your business actually needs to make.
The companies that will thrive in 2026 share common characteristics: they’ve reset their understanding of excellence, they prove value quickly rather than promising it eventually, and they treat every technology investment as a means to better decisions. They don’t wait for perfect conditions. They build capability while conditions are imperfect, because that’s the only time available.
