Clinging to Resilience is a Losing Game, The Regenerate Leap

By Stuart J. Green

The question leaders keep asking about AI is the wrong one.

They ask for a forecast. Tell us where AI is going. Tell us how fast it will move. Tell us what it will do to our model, so we can plan.

No one can answer that. The forecasts are being revised as fast as the technology moves. That is not a gap in the research. It is the condition.

The Regenerate Leap

Resilience is the wrong frame

Faced with a future they cannot see, most leaders do one of two things.

They predict harder. They commission more analysis to narrow a range that will not narrow.

Or they harden what they have. They defend the current model against a shock they assume will pass.

Both are forms of resilience. Both are losing moves.

Resilience works when the threat is known and the baseline is stable. It absorbs a shock and returns the system to where it was. That is useful when there is a prior state worth restoring.

AI offers neither.

There is no single threat to harden against. There is no stable baseline to return to. The ground the model stood on is the thing now moving.

Leaders sense this, even if they have not named it. PwC’s 29th Annual Global CEO Survey, published in January 2026, found confidence in revenue growth at its lowest level in five years. One of the questions executives ranked near the top was whether they were changing fast enough to keep pace with technology.

They are not asking how to predict the future. They are admitting they cannot.

Only one in eight CEOs report that AI spending has produced both lower cost and higher revenue. The tools are arriving. Where they lead is not yet legible.

What to build instead

When you cannot know the destination, committing harder to one route is the error.

Every investment that perfects the current model is a bet that the conditions it was built for will hold. They will not.

Regeneration is the discipline for an unknowable trajectory.

It does not ask leaders to recover the old model. It asks them to remove the commitments that lock the organisation into one future, build the few capabilities that matter under new conditions, and compound what works as the picture changes.

That is the logic behind RAZE, ENRICH, GROW.

RAZE strips operating assumptions that no longer hold.

ENRICH builds the few capabilities that change outcomes under new conditions.

GROW executes under thin margins and compounds what works.

This is not a recovery model. It is not resilience by another name. It is a structural method for conditions that will not return to form.

It starts with one concrete act. Name one commitment this quarter that assumes the old conditions will return. Stop it.

Then, because no forecast will tell you what to build in its place, find out the only way left open. Run small experiments. Let results, not prediction, decide what is worth scaling.

Fire does not restore the forest

Natural systems have run this logic far longer than any market.

Some pine species are serotinous. Their cones stay sealed in resin for years and open only under the heat of fire. The forest that follows is not the forest that burned.

The system does not predict the fire. It holds the capacity to regenerate after one, whenever it comes.

That distinction matters.

AI is not a storm that passes. It is a change in the conditions themselves. The conditions will keep changing.

The leaders who treat AI as a passing shock will defend the wrong things. The leaders who treat it as a structural shift will build differently.

The advantage is moving

This changes what businesses compete on.

The efficiency of the current model is the thing AI will make cheap and common. The advantage moves to the speed at which a firm can grow its next model.

Bain’s 2024 research found that 88% of business transformations fail to reach their original ambition, most often because leaders change the output while leaving the structure intact.

PwC’s 2026 CEO Survey points in the other direction. Companies that reinvent their business and operating models report a typical 71% performance premium, measured through a combination of profit margin and revenue growth.

That premium is not a payoff leaders can forecast and bank. It is what reinvention correlates with.

The gap between the one in eight companies capturing value from AI and everyone else is not simply how much they spend. It is whether they change the model underneath the spending.

Regeneration is the standing ability to keep changing the structure as the picture changes.

Three questions for your board

If you sit on a board or lead a senior team, these questions separate preparing for one future from building for many.

1. What in our current model are we defending because it works today, not because it will hold under the conditions ahead?
2. Where are we spending on AI to run the existing model faster, instead of asking whether that part of the model should exist?
3. Are we asking leaders to predict the future, when we should be asking whether they can regenerate the business through whatever it becomes?

The next three years will not reward the most precise forecasts. They will reward the organisations that can strip what no longer holds, build what the new conditions require, and grow what proves itself under pressure.

The fire is inevitable. The leap is a choice.

Stuart J. Green is the founder of Blue-Green Advisors and author of The Regenerate Leap (2026). He advises institutional leaders on what comes next when traditional recovery approaches have structurally failed. He has held charity, government, and industry advisory roles, including with the UK Blue Planet Fund and the Asian Development Bank. His Operating Model Fitness Index is available at theregenerateframework.com

References

Bain & Company. (2024, April 15). 88% of business transformations fail to achieve their original ambitions; those that succeed avoid overloading top talent. https://www.bain.com/about/media-center/press-releases/2024/88-of-business-transformations-fail-to-achieve-their-original-ambitions-those-that-succeed-avoid-overloading-top-talent/

Pausas, J. G., & Keeley, J. E. (2019). Wildfires as an ecosystem service. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, 17(5), 289–295. https://doi.org/10.1002/fee.2044

PwC. (2026, January). Leading through uncertainty in the age of AI: PwC’s 29th Annual Global CEO Survey. https://www.pwc.com/gx/en/ceo-survey/2026/pwc-ceo-survey-2026.pdf

World Economic Forum. (2026, January 19). What CEOs are saying and need to know in 2026. https://www.weforum.org/stories/2026/01/pwc-ceo-survey-highlights-2026/

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