Your 2027 plan assumes something only 17% of leaders have

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Hey Spark Family,

We have been in a lot of planning sessions these past few weeks, the kind where 2027 starts taking shape on a whiteboard.

The plans are genuinely good. Ambitious in the right places, clear-eyed about what has to change. The people in those rooms are smart and committed and they have done this before (many times).

And in almost every session, there is an assumption sitting quietly underneath the whole thing that nobody ever says out loud.

That the leaders in the building will be able to carry it.

Not whether the strategy is right. Whether the people responsible for landing it have the capacity and the capability to lead their teams through another year of change.

DDI just put a number on that assumption, and our whole team cannot stop talking about it.

The Research Is Clear

DDI just released its Global Leadership Forecast 2027, drawing on 11,395 leaders and 2,519 HR professionals across more than 1,900 organizations in over 50 countries. It is the twelfth edition of a study they have been running since 1999.

➡ Only 17% of leaders feel very prepared to anticipate and react to change. SEVENTEEN PERCENT!! (Which also means 83% do not.)

➡ 63% of change-ready leaders stay productive when things go sideways. Among leaders who are not change-ready, 21%.

➡ Organizations with effective change leadership are 2.4X more likely to meet or exceed their financial targets.

That last number belongs in every Q4 planning room in the country.

Change leadership is not a development nicety. It is showing up directly in whether companies hit their numbers.

But here is the finding that stopped us.

➡ Change-ready leaders are 1.5X more likely to have energy left at the end of the day.

Same pace. Same demands. Same relentless year.

The difference is whether they feel equipped for it.

I read that stat three times. Because most people have been treating change fatigue as a volume problem, something you solve by slowing down, which almost nobody can actually do.

This data says something else entirely. A meaningful part of the exhaustion is not coming from the amount of change. It is coming from leading change you do not feel prepared to lead.

That is a completely different problem. And unlike the pace, it is one you can actually do something about.

What I'm Seeing In The Field

The leaders we work with are not fragile and they are not resistant. They are carrying more than any playbook prepared them for, and most of them are doing it without ever having been taught how.

We see the leader who has added three change initiatives this year, each one individually justified. Nobody has ever asked whether his team has capacity for the cumulative weight of all three. He has not asked either, because every one of them seemed reasonable at the time.

We see the leader caught in a bind that DDI named precisely: 73% of leaders feel strong pressure to get it right the first time, even as everything around her keeps shifting. Change requires experimenting and course correcting. Perfectionism makes both impossible. So she freezes, or over-prepares, or quietly avoids the call that needs making.

And we see the leader who is personally depleted and has decided it means something about him. That he is not cut out for this pace, that everyone else seems to be managing just fine. He has never considered that he was handed a job nobody equipped him for, and that his exhaustion is information rather than a verdict.

That last one gets me every time, because it is so common and so completely wrong.

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What We Teach Leaders Inside Spark Brilliance

When we work with organizations on this, we start with one simple, yet major, reframe:

The critical shift is from change management to change enablement. Change management treats each change as a project to get through. Change enablement builds a leader’s capacity to lead change (after change after change).

And we’ve seen this with our clients for years, but this huge new study validates that building this capacity protects your results and your people at the same time, which is a rare thing to be able to say about anything!

Three things make the difference:

1. Build it before you need it, not during. Most organizations try to develop change capability in the middle of a change, which is the hardest possible moment to learn anything. The leaders who thrive build the muscle beforehand. That is exactly why this is a Q4 conversation and not a March one.

2. Name the cumulative load, not just the next initiative. Every change gets introduced on its own merits. Nobody ever adds them up out loud. When a leader finally names the full weight her team is carrying, two things happen at once: people feel seen, and the leader gets an honest picture of capacity for the first time.

3. Treat energy as a performance metric. Leaders who often feel used up are 3.9X more likely to learn about problems later than they should have. Energy is not a wellness topic. It is a leading indicator. The leader running on empty in October is the leader who misses the early warning in February.

⭐ Leadership Challenge

As you finalize what next year looks like, sit with these honestly.

➡ What is my 2027 plan assuming about my leaders’ capability that I have never actually verified?

➡ If I added up every change my team is absorbing right now, what is the real number?

➡ Who on my team is running on empty, and have I been reading that as a personal failing rather than a capability gap?

And the one worth sitting with longest:

Am I planning to build the capability, or just hoping the people carrying it hold out one more year?

Only 17% of leaders feel ready for what is coming, and I hope that number hits you as hard as it hit me. In a world that feels very out of control, this is something we can do something about.

That is a very good thing to put on a Q4 agenda.

With gratitude,
​Jackie

P.S. – If you are building a 2027 plan and want to pressure-test what it is assuming about your leaders, hit reply. These are our favorite conversations to have this time of year, and they are a lot more useful in November than they are in March.✨

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