When the Ground Won’t Hold
Living in Permanent Disruption
We keep waiting for things to calm down. For the dust to settle, the market to steady and the pace of change to finally ease. But what if this is it? What if constant disruption isn’t the exception, it’s the air we’re breathing now?
Since 2000, more than 50% of the Fortune 500 have disappeared. Brands once seen as unstoppable, WeWork, Vice, Peloton, lost up to 90+% of market value when their foundations met new realities.
Here’s what's happening, real time:
In Australia, insolvencies surged 39% in FY24, even as new businesses increased 2.8%. FY25 is showing further rise. This is a signal: businesses are being born and businesses are failing, fast.
Globally, an Accenture survey (2024) found that the rate of change has risen by 183% since 2019 across six key disruption consumer behaviour. And yet more than half of C-suite leaders said they are not fully prepared for what’s coming.
These aren’t random shocks. They’re the new reality. Disruption now moves through every system, policy, markets, technology, people. When one part shifts, everything else is forced to follow. The mistake is treating disruption like a one-off event, something you can bunker down and outlast. It’s not a storm. It’s the climate and survival depends not on managing change but on building the capacity to reinvent, again and again.
The mistake is treating disruption like a one-off event, something you can bunker down and outlast. It’s not a storm. It’s the climate, and survival depends not on managing change but on building the capacity to reinvent, again and again.
Because disruption doesn’t just collapse companies, it seeps into people. It shows up in stress levels, in fractured focus, in leaders carrying more weight than ever. The pressure isn’t just to perform, but to continually evolve.
This is why reinvention can’t be optional. It’s not a side project or a clever strategy exercise. It’s the muscle that keeps organisations alive, leaders relevant, and people able to do their best work in the middle of uncertainty.
