The University of Sydney’s recently released 2027 Skills Horizon (Peter et al., 2026) describes the coming years as a ‘decade of disorientation’, characterised by shifts in values, technology, accountability, energy, trust and information, and by a world in which risk and opportunity, noise and signal, turbulence and stability, are increasingly entangled.
The report’s language of disorientation resonates with much of what I have been thinking and writing about leadership over recent years: how leaders navigate complexity and competing tensions; how we maintain the human, relational and ethical core of our work; and how we sustain ourselves intellectually and emotionally amid the relentlessness of leadership.
No one wants to lead
One of the report’s provocations is starkly titled ‘No one wants your job’. It points to a concerning leadership pipeline, citing data that 41% of jobseekers do not see leadership in their career plans, that 75% of middle managers are burning out, and that Gen Z employees are 1.7 times more likely to turn down a leadership role for work-life reasons. These statistics sit alongside the report’s wider picture of community pessimism, declining trust, social fragmentation, technological disruption and uncertainty about whether the next generation will be better off than the last.
That is, at a time when we need thoughtful, values-led, courageous leaders, leadership itself is becoming less desirable. Something that worries me is the possibility that our understandable desire for ‘work-life balance’ and ‘happiness’ can sometimes become a shrinking away from productive struggle, from doing difficult things that demand effort, stretch us, and bring the satisfaction of accomplishment and of contributing to something that matters.
Martin Seligman’s work on flourishing deliberately moves beyond happiness as feeling good. His PERMA model includes positive emotion, but also engagement, relationships, meaning and accomplishment. Nassim Taleb’s idea of antifragility offers a related idea: that challenge and uncertainty can sometimes strengthen rather than merely deplete us. A sustainable life in leadership cannot be one of relentless strain or depletion, but nor is it one in which difficulty is treated primarily as something to eliminate. There can be nourishment in effort, growth in challenge, and deep satisfaction in doing something hard and worthwhile with and for others.
If leadership appears from the outside to be an exhausting accumulation of heavy responsibility, constant availability, increasing scrutiny, impossible expectations and perpetual urgency, it is understandable that the pipeline thins. Leaders must consider, not only how we develop future leaders, but also what kinds of leadership we are modelling for them, and how we remain connected to work that gives us energy and meaning.
Wayfinding leadership
The Skills Horizon’s notion of ‘horizon leadership’ resonates with the concept of wayfinding leadership (Netolicky & Golledge, 2021), with the report noting that leaders should set direction without overdetermining the route, and retain enough strategic clarity to act while remaining flexible as new information emerges.
Wayfinding is useful as a metaphor because it resists the idea of the leader as heroic knower, confidently steering others along a predetermined route. Instead, the leader is attentive to context and conditions, drawing on values, knowledge, relationships, experience and multiple forms of evidence while remaining responsive to what emerges. We carry maps and instruments, but we also look up and around. We notice. We adjust our course. We know where we are trying to go without assuming that we already know exactly what will meet us along the way or what we will need to do.
To navigate uncertainty means to hold our values tightly and our ideas loosely: to be clear about purpose, principles and the kind of organisation or community we are seeking to build, while being willing to change our minds about the means by which we might get there.
Playful and hopeful leadership
The Skills Horizon report says that leaders now need to add ‘play’ to their skillset, positioning play as a mode of problem-solving, experimentation and sensemaking that enables leaders to respond creatively when familiar approaches no longer fit. While play may sound nebulous and indulgent in a time of geopolitical uncertainty, technological acceleration, social polarisation and workforce pressures, playfulness allows us to lean into what energises and enlivens us, creating space for curiosity, humour, experimentation, pleasure and surprise.
For me, the report also points to the need for hopeful leadership amid declining trust in institutions and increasing community pessimism. If we are to lead through a time of complexity, uncertainty, and even despair, we must ground our work in the belief that, while we cannot control everything that happens around us, our actions, relationships, choices and contributions continue to matter.
Working in schools brings meaning and purpose; as a school leader, I always know why I am getting out of bed in the morning. Leadership can contain weight, loneliness and sacrifice, but it can also contain meaning, learning, connection, creativity and joy. It can be an opportunity to build something with others, to create the conditions for people to flourish, to wrestle thoughtfully with difficult questions, and to make a positive contribution.
Playful and hopeful leadership does not ignore responsibility or difficulty. Nor is it paralysed by pessimism or so serious that imagination is suffocated. It creates enough space, trust and optimism for people to think, disagree, experiment, imagine and play.
References
Netolicky, D. M., & Golledge, C. (2021). Wayfinding: Navigating complexity for sustainable school leadership. In Future alternatives for educational leadership (pp. 38-53). Routledge.
Peter, S., Riemer, K., Norman, P. (2026). The 2027 Skills Horizon. Sydney Executive Plus, The University of Sydney.
