Choose the Right CEO for Volatile Times

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When COVID-19 first hit, many boards assumed they could delay CEO transitions until the storm passed. But five years later it’s clear there is no “other side” of the storm. In this unpredictable environment, where traditional forecasting models falter, it can be difficult for boards to know how to plan for succession—and many, in fact, are getting it wrong. The “safe” approach to succession is in fact a risky and counterproductive one.  

What matters most in CEOs today is not the depth but the range of their experience, particularly with organizational change, failure, and recovery. If boards hire leaders who are unfamiliar with those challenges, they expose companies to three potential problems that can erode their competitiveness: 

1. Rigid playbooks. Leaders with years of experience tend to be good at pattern recognition. But when the market is shifting or novel or uncertain conditions prevail, pattern recognition can become a liability. An established playbook can limit a CEO’s ability to spot new threats and organizational needs and to act on unconventional opportunities. Especially if their experience is rooted in a fundamentally different environment, leaders are likely to revert to outdated assumptions and miss vital signals and information.  Boards must look beyond simple markers of experience and ask, What will we need this person to do, given our specific context and the key challenges we’ve identified for the future?
2. Cultural calcification. Leaders who have mastered legacy operating models may be less inclined to challenge inherited assumptions or adapt to emerging business realities. That can be a big negative when outgoing CEOs have served for so long that organizations’ cultures, systems, and processes have been built to complement their style and preferences. The problem is especially acute when the outgoing CEO stays on as the executive chair.
3. Shorter tenures. Experienced CEOs don’t tend to stay in the job as long as novice CEOs do.  This can be explained in part by the fact that some boards are adopting a chapter-based approach to CEO selection, appointing leaders to guide the company through a specific phase of evolution rather than assuming every CEO must serve a decade or more. But most boards do so only reactively, without structured planning. That can create an unintended “staccato” effect, with each new CEO launching fresh priorities before prior efforts fully gain traction.

Instead of leaning into safety and stability when choosing CEOs, boards need to treat the hiring process as a chance to gain an edge over competitors. Three ways they can do this by adopting a structured approach to leadership selection:

Balance risk and reward. When a change in leadership is far away, boards tend to have a greater appetite for transformation. They think more expansively about where the business could go. But as the transition nears, many boards get anchored in where the business is today, leading them to see novel candidates as risky. This, in turn, leads them to end up selecting more-traditional, “expected” candidates.  This tendency is both understandable and limiting.  The key for boards is to develop a clear understanding of where their company and the CEO are in their life cycles and then to match CEO selection to the moment.

Prioritize CEO development through “always on” succession planning. Firms should deliberately cultivate leaders by giving them diverse, nonlinear roles and assignments that build resilience and adaptability. They should “chess-board” talent—placing high-potential executives in unfamiliar contexts where experience alone won’t suffice. The idea is to ensure that leaders maintain a beginner’s mindset even as they gain more and more know-how. Rotations, crisis simulations, and stakeholder-facing jobs all can help shape managers into leaders who can recognize patterns without becoming stuck in them.  Boards also must work hard to ensure that the company’s pool of senior leaders contains a range of thinking styles, backgrounds, and perspectives.

Reframe the selection criteria. Instead of being guided purely by past-oriented criteria—such as sector expertise, a prior CEO role, or a track record of financial results—boards should establish forward-looking criteria that capture leaders’ adaptability, innovativeness, and long-term strategic vision. In times of complexity and rapid change, the most effective leaders are agile thinkers who can solve ambiguous problems, guide teams through uncertainty, and build the organization’s capacity to sustain transformation.  This is where the concept of executive intelligence comes in.

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