The world is not experiencing a single crisis but a polycrisis — multiple interconnected disruptions that compound each other: geopolitical conflict, climate disruption, pandemic aftershocks, technological disruption, democratic erosion, and economic fragmentation. Heifetz's adaptive leadership framework, developed in the 1990s, is experiencing a renaissance because it was designed for exactly this kind of challenge — situations where the problem definition itself is contested, where technical solutions are insufficient, and where progress requires changes in values, beliefs, and behavior.
Gilpin-Jackson (2025), in Leader to Leader, proposes dialectical leadership as the new calling in an era of polycrises. Dialectical leadership — the ability to hold and work with contradictions rather than resolving them prematurely — extends adaptive leadership by acknowledging that polycrises present not just complex problems but genuinely paradoxical ones where competing values and objectives cannot be reconciled and must instead be managed simultaneously.
Leslie et al. (2025), at the Center for Creative Leadership, examine leading multiteam systems in polycrisis conditions. Their research finds that polycrisis leadership requires capabilities that single-crisis leadership does not: the ability to manage resource allocation across competing priorities, coordinate response across organizational boundaries, and maintain strategic coherence when every priority is urgent. The multiteam system lens is critical because polycrises cannot be addressed by single teams — they require orchestrated responses across multiple organizations with different cultures, incentives, and authority structures.
Leslie (2025) also offers ten practices for threading the needle — practical leadership behaviors for navigating polycrisis conditions. These practices emphasize sense-making over solution-finding, relationship-building over command-and-control, and adaptive experimentation over comprehensive planning. The common thread is that polycrisis leadership is not about having answers but about building the organizational capacity to find answers in conditions of radical uncertainty.
The polycrisis lens is relevant for AI leadership because AI transformation is itself one of the compounding disruptions that leaders must navigate simultaneously. A healthcare executive implementing AI diagnostic tools is not doing so in a stable environment — they are doing so while managing workforce shortages, regulatory changes, budget pressures, and evolving patient expectations. AI leadership that ignores the polycrisis context will produce technically sound solutions that fail in organizationally complex reality.
The Adaptive Response Repertoire
The polycrisis demands not a single leadership response but a repertoire of responses that can be deployed and combined as conditions change. The ten practices Leslie identifies include: building peripheral vision (monitoring weak signals across multiple domains), developing scenario fluency (the ability to think through multiple possible futures simultaneously), maintaining strategic reserves (keeping resources uncommitted for emerging crises), and cultivating coalition agility (the ability to form and dissolve partnerships rapidly as situations evolve).
What distinguishes polycrisis leadership from conventional crisis leadership is the multiplicity and interconnection of challenges. A single crisis can be addressed through focused attention and dedicated resources. A polycrisis requires distributed attention across multiple fronts, resource allocation under radical uncertainty about which front will become most critical, and the cognitive flexibility to shift priorities as the relative severity of interconnected crises changes.
The AI dimension adds a layer of complexity. AI systems can help leaders process the information complexity of polycrisis conditions — monitoring multiple data streams, identifying patterns across domains, and modeling scenario interactions. But AI systems can also contribute to polycrisis dynamics — through algorithmic amplification of social tensions, automation-driven employment disruption, and the geopolitical competition for AI dominance that itself constitutes one dimension of the current polycrisis. Leaders must use AI to manage polycrisis while recognizing that AI is part of the polycrisis they are managing.
The temporal dimension of polycrisis leadership also matters. Single crises have relatively clear beginnings and endings. Polycrises are persistent, overlapping, and recursive, with new crises emerging from the interactions of existing ones. Leaders must develop the psychological resilience to operate indefinitely under crisis conditions without burning out themselves or their organizations. The practices Leslie identifies support this sustained capacity by distributing leadership responsibility, building redundancy into critical functions, and maintaining the organizational slack that allows response to unexpected developments. Adaptive leadership under polycrisis is not a sprint or a marathon but an ongoing expedition through terrain that is simultaneously challenging and continually changing.
The institutional memory dimension is equally critical. Organizations that have weathered previous crises have accumulated knowledge about what works and what does not under extreme conditions. This knowledge, stored in routines, relationships, and shared mental models, is a strategic asset that cannot be purchased or borrowed. Leaders who invest in capturing and codifying crisis experience build organizational capabilities that compound over successive disruptions, while leaders who treat each crisis as a fresh challenge waste institutional learning and repeat avoidable mistakes.