Addressing Grand Challenges’ Paradoxes: Leadership Skills to Manage Inconsistencies

Our world increasingly presents grand challenges, such as climate change, poverty, and digitalization. Their inherent complexity creates paradoxical tensions that leaders need to respond to in addressing these challenges. Yet, these tensions also point to the limits of traditional leadership models. While traditional models encourage leaders to make tough choices in the face of competing demands and maintain consistency in these choices, addressing grand challenges requires future leadership to engage competing demands simultaneously. The current article outlines leadership skills to address these competing demands in a “consistently inconsistent” way.