HBR IdeaCast New Skills to Navigate Continuous Change
400 snips
May 5, 2026 
Nilofer Merchant, leadership expert, author, and former Apple executive, explores what it really takes to thrive through constant change. She digs into shared ownership over control, slowing down to solve the right problem, competence over performative confidence, and how curiosity, better meetings, and healthier team norms can unlock smarter innovation.
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Normalize Discomfort Before Collaboration
- Normalize discomfort before asking teams to collaborate on change, because new questions and new takes require sitting in uncertainty.
- Merchant borrows Orange Theory's line: growth is supposed to feel hard, and leaders must trust the answer can be built without knowing it upfront.
Open Invitations Exposed the Missing Piece
- Merchant says stuck companies often solve faster by inviting more employees into the problem instead of narrowing decision-making to executives and consultants.
- In her workshops, an open invitation surfaced missing customer and sales context, and within three to four weeks the room finally saw the whole elephant.
Confidence Crowds Out Competence
- Merchant says organizations overreward confidence even when competence matters more, pushing people to fake certainty instead of developing better solutions.
- She ties this to innovation's real drivers—novel ideas, combining ideas, and solving future problems—and notes AI already does speed and confident output well, often wrongly.
