A surprising skill for doing good work when everything is changing fast
We are in the time of the Big Storms.
So many of the things once treated as stable; our economies, political systems, climate, technologies, even social norms, are shifting underneath us in real time.
Uncertainty feels like a permanent feature of modern life. And it is upending the definition of professional leadership.
Rethinking Rejection
My research shows that this reality demands two difficult shifts:
We are being asked to try things without knowing if they will work.
We need to work together across differences, disciplines, and institutions, even when that collaboration feels uncomfortable or messy.
Both these shifts are rife with rejection, and culturally, we are poorly equipped to handle this.
Under pressure, we face failed experiments, disagreement, criticism, unmet expectations, and loss.
Ideas stall. Efforts fall short. We disappoint ourselves and one another.
Yet all the data has brought me to a counterintuitive conclusion:
Cultivating an intentional relationship with professional rejection is one of the most critical skills that this moment demands.
My work explores how we build this capacity for leadership, teams, and innovation.
Keynotes
Many systems still have us interpreting rejection as personal failure instead of a normal condition of adaptation. Almost all our market and social incentives are based on how to avoid the pain of rejection. Understanding rejection and building the capacity to continue through it is a non-negotiable skill for leaders, teams, and those responsible for creating a leading edge for their businesses.
Leadership
Most leadership cultures tend to reward certainty, decisiveness, and composure, while vulnerability and self-doubt often remain hidden beneath the surface.
Many leaders learn very early that rejection is something to move past quickly, intellectualize, or quietly absorb alone.
Yet rejection rarely disappears when we move on. It can resurface as defensiveness, overcontrol, rigidity, or avoidance. In uncertain times, leaders will inevitably encounter rejection, failure, and discomfort. Learning to work with these experiences - not simply protect ourselves from them - may be one of leadership’s most essential capacities.
Team Building
Under Big Storms, many leaders quietly start treating team building as a luxury reserved for calmer periods.
When conditions become volatile, relational work is often the first thing deprioritized in favor of speed, efficiency, crisis management, or short-term output.
I understand the instinct.
Under pressure, team building can feel secondary to results, stability, or managing uncertainty. Yet this is often when teams become most fragile. Trust, clarity, and relational safety are not distractions from performance - they are infrastructure. They help teams navigate ambiguity, absorb rejection, recover from setbacks, and keep functioning together when pressure is sustained.
Innovation
We often talk about innovation as a lightning strike: the moonshot, the breakthrough idea, bold pivot, or disruptive success. Ambitious future-state visions can feel emotionally comforting because they create the illusion of momentum and control, at least in the short term
But in the time of the Big Storms, meaningful innovation depends less on miracles than on staying in “the dip” - where rejection accumulates, excitement fades, and operational realities surface.
This is where good ideas often die, not from lack of potential, but because organizations struggle to sustain attention, iteration, listening, and recalibration long enough for change to take hold.