by Ben Davern, Research & Insights at Irish Management Institute
Outside Berghain, Berlin’s most famous nightclub, thousands wait in line every weekend. There’s no guest list and no clear rule for who gets in. Inside, it’s one of the most open, accepting spaces in the world.
That contradiction — highly selective at the door, radically inclusive inside — says something about culture. Every group, company or movement must decide who and what it is…and who and what it isn’t. The same tension defines leadership today. How flexible can you be before you lose what makes you distinct? How open before you stop standing for anything?
“Adaptability” has become a leadership mantra. Agility, resilience and pivoting are usually presented as universal virtues. Yet as both Gina London and Domhnal Slattery argued at the National Leadership Conference, adaptability without anchors can drift into inconsistency. The real challenge is knowing when to bend and when to hold the line — when to flex to new realities and when to protect the core values that define a culture.
This is the paradox of adaptive leadership: to constantly evolve without losing overall coherence.
Adaptation vs. Capitulation
To state that “uncertainty is the new normal” may seem like repeating a cliché, but for leaders obsessed with ROI, business cases and revenue forecasts, that uncertain reality can feel deeply unsettling. Political volatility, social division and shifting employee expectations have made long-term planning increasingly fragile, and many seasoned leaders are left feeling overwhelmed when the traditional metrics they have used to decrease uncertainty are no longer fit for purpose.
For example, the uncertainty that comes with high levels of cultural polarisation can be difficult to quantify on a balance sheet or visualise on a PowerPoint slide. Many organisations are adjusting their language and policies in an attempt to keep pace with social headwinds coming from the US and elsewhere, i.e. rebranding diversity and equity initiatives under softer terms like “access” or going as far as “greenhushing,” whereby companies intentionally under-report or remain silent about their sustainability efforts.
But, as Gina London noted, how far before adaptation becomes capitulation?
While leaders face pressure from multiple directions, and the instinct to adjust can be strong, adaptability without an anchor risks eroding credibility. Adaption, she argued, should be elastic, bending under pressure without breaking the spine of leadership integrity. The ability to flex communication style, delivery or operational approach must always be tethered to a clearly defined set of internal principles.
Under London’s framing, leadership is not a series of transactions or optics but an expression of character. The most effective leaders don’t chase trends; they translate enduring values into relevant action. “Authenticity,” she noted, “isn’t saying anything to anyone at any time. It’s aligning internal values with external behaviours, consistently.”
Values as the Inflexible Spine
Domhnal Slattery echoed that same principle but from an entirely different vantage point. Having spent his career in global aviation boardrooms, Slattery emphasised a principle he calls “Tribe” — a clearly articulated, visible set of values that guides every decision.
Everyone in his organisations, he noted, knows what the culture stands for; all hiring, firing and operational decisions are measured against this internal compass. When crisis hits, he said, culture is the immune system of scale. In 2008, facing financial collapse, it was those embedded values rather than spreadsheets and data that steadied the company. Adaptability mattered, but inflexible integrity mattered more.
In many ways, both speakers offered a corrective to the cult of flexibility: agility needs a spine. Gina London urged leaders to get “crystal clear on their top three values,” not as slogans but as behavioural compasses. Domhnal Slattery’s version was more institutional: everyone in his corridors knew the “Tribe” values by heart.
But this raises a deeper question: when does a tribe become a cult?
Culture, after all, draws its strength from a deeply-held, almost obsessive shared belief about the organisation’s mission and purpose. “You can’t spell culture without ‘cult,’” as Peter Thiel once said non-ironically. But great leaders walk this tightrope intentionally, ensuring the values that define the culture do not ossify into exclusionary dogma. They build what might be called inclusive exclusivity: belonging rooted in values, not in sameness. Like the (in)famous Berlin club Berghain, whose door policy is both highly selective and strangely egalitarian, great cultures protect standards while remaining porous enough to welcome the right new energy.
One way to think about this is as an inclusive-exclusionary model:
- Inclusive: open access to those who embrace the core values.
- Exclusionary: clear boundaries that maintain cohesion and purpose.
Values, in this sense, define where a leader must not be adaptive. They are the non-negotiables that give coherence amid chaos. That rigidity at the core allows for agility at the edges: tactics, markets and communication can flex, while underlying values remain unmoving.
Communication as Culture
Leadership and communication are inseparable, according to Gina London. “Everything is a comms event,” she said, from a board presentation to a casual corridor conversation. Every micro-signal, from body language to tone of voice, either builds or erodes trust.
Her framework — Strategy, Structure, Delivery — reframes communication not as style, but as infrastructure.
- Strategy: Know your desired outcome. What do you want people to think, feel, and do?
- Structure: Lead with the hook, build with story or data, close with clarity.
- Delivery: Your presence — tone, pacing, expression — is the transmission of culture.
In other words, communication is culture in motion. When a leader speaks, listens or even stays silent, they reinforce what the organisation believes about authority, trust and inclusion. Particularly in volatile contexts, that clarity of intent becomes the stabilising force or “scaffolding” for alignment when everything else shifts.
Humanity as Competitive Advantage
Both speakers agreed that leadership is irreducibly human. London urged executives to “human up” in an AI world, or to reassert empathy and presence while technology accelerates. Slattery put it slightly more bluntly: “People need to like you.” For him, leadership is relational capital, built through allyship, mentorship and sponsorship.
In Slattery’s company, a psychologist sits outside HR to support performance and reduce bias in succession decisions, which crucially signals that culture is psychology, not just process. London’s neuroscience-based approach to communication reflects the same belief from another angle: leadership operates through emotion, perception and human chemistry.
Amidst digital noise and algorithmic precision, it is warmth — as opposed to more data — that sustains loyalty.
Resilience, Reinvention and the Courage to Hold Steady
Slattery’s story of failure and recovery embodies what might be called resilient adaptability. After losing everything, he rebuilt not by abandoning his principles, but by returning to them. “The best time to start a business is often when the world is in disarray,” he noted. Crises, for him, are opportunities for reinvention, not excuses to retreat.
That capacity to face uncertainty without losing conviction is what London calls the “lens shift”: moving from reaction to reflection and from panic to purpose. Neuroscience supports this: leaders who can regulate their own emotional states create coherence for those around them, which is a key aspect of the Managing Self competence area making up IMI’s Leadership Model.
Adaptation, in this sense, isn’t about speed; it’s about discernment. It’s knowing when to pivot and when to persist.
The Art and Science of Leadership
Perhaps the deepest connection between both speakers lay in their shared belief that leadership is both analytical and artistic. London draws on both neuroscience and storytelling; Slattery, inspired by the Florentine model, invests in both STEM and the humanities. “In a high-tech world,” he said, “storytelling comes to the fore.”
That synthesis of left and right brain — logic and empathy — is central to adaptive leadership. Strategy without humanity becomes sterile; empathy without structure becomes chaos. The art lies in blending the two to design cultures that can bend without breaking and inspire without manipulating.
This is what London calls preparation through values: embedding principles that guide every decision and action. It’s what Slattery exemplifies through his “Tribe”: a cultural spine that enables risk-taking, innovation and scale.
Together they illustrate that the most effective leadership in uncertain times is neither purely reactive nor rigidly dogmatic. It is disciplined, values-driven and human-centred.
Leadership in the Human Age
If we live in a world where uncertainty is the norm and adaptability is essential, leaders face constant trade-offs. How flexible can you be before you appear inconsistent? How rigid must your culture be to maintain identity, yet porous enough to welcome diversity?
Both speakers demonstrated the answers lie not in maximizing one side over the other, but in balancing the two: in an era defined by technology and turbulence, the differentiator is human coherence. Adaptive leaders are not shapeshifters; instead they are translators turning enduring values into action. They know what can flex, and what must not. They understand that culture is both message and medium.
In a world obsessed with agility, this reminds us that some things — integrity, empathy and clarity of purpose — should remain gloriously inflexible.
About the author
Ben Davern is responsible for research & Insights with the Irish Management Institute (IMI), Ireland’s leading executive education provider since 1952. Ben’s research and content focus includes leadership and management, skills gaps and capability development, talent strategy, AI & automation, Future of Work, High-Performance teams, cognitive diversity.
