Leading through complexity: what the Inner Development Goals offer

Anyone moving into senior leadership - or helping others prepare for it - is likely to study an organisation’s annual report with a fine-tooth comb. Equally revealing, though far harder to obtain, is its risk register. It offers a glimpse of the issues that give leaders sleepless nights: financial instability, cyber threats, regulatory failure, staff retention, reputational damage, and more. The difficulty lies not simply in the number of risks, but in the way they interconnect: action in one area can have unintended consequences elsewhere. Recognising and navigating the complexity of those connections is one of the greatest tests leaders face - and a central concern for those who support their development. 

In the present climate, risk registers are unlikely to become shorter or simpler. Drawing on the insights of more than 900 experts worldwide, the World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report 2025 describes a fractured landscape in which geopolitical, environmental, societal, economic, and technological risks are escalating and converging. Willis Towers Watson’s 2025 Emerging and Interconnected Risks Survey brings the point closer to home. Responses from 68 UK executives across 11 industries identified 187 emerging risks and 364 connections between them. Those connections make the consequences harder to foresee and manage and the task of leaders evermore complex. Only 47% of respondents believed their organisation’s business model and strategy were resilient to the current risk landscape. 

The challenge, then, is not simply to identify and mitigate an expanding catalogue of risks. It is to exercise sound judgement when risks interact, priorities compete, evidence is incomplete, and every course of action carries consequences.  

Technical expertise remains essential: leaders need sufficient financial literacy, regulatory awareness, and understanding of governance and risk to ask the right questions and recognise when specialist advice is required. But expertise alone cannot determine how competing considerations should be weighed. Leaders also need to remain grounded, make sense of complexity and work across difference, amid uncertainty. 

This is where the Inner Development Goals¹ (IDGs) offer a useful lens. The IDGs describe the qualities that can help leaders navigate complexity -  and the premise is simple: delivering change in the world also requires us to develop the capacities within ourselves. 

The framework gathers these capacities into five connected dimensions: 

• Being is about remaining present, self-aware, and guided by an inner compass. 
• Thinking enables us to question assumptions, recognise patterns, take different perspectives, and keep the longer term in view.  
• Relating cultivates humility, empathy, compassion, and connection with others and the wider world.  
• Collaborating builds the trust, communication, and inclusion needed to work across boundaries and mobilise people around a shared purpose.  
• Acting turns understanding into change through courage, creativity, optimism, and perseverance.  

The strength of the IDGs lies not in any one dimension, but in the way all five reinforce one another. They are neither another competency checklist nor a substitute for technical expertise. Rather, they offer leaders a guide to the human capacities on which wise judgement depends when leading change in complex environments. They also give those supporting leaders a language for exploring those capacities without reducing leadership development to a set of techniques.  

Navigating complexity requires leaders who can remain grounded, connect insights that specialists may examine separately, listen across difference, draw out collective intelligence, and act without waiting for certainty. 

This is why the IDGs resonate so well with Windsor Leadership’s approach. The Windsor Way offers something organisational life seldom affords: space to step back, reflect on how one is leading, listen across difference, and test one’s thinking with peers from other sectors.  

Complexity cannot be understood from a single institutional or professional perspective. For leaders, this creates an opportunity not merely to become more effective, but to deepen their self-awareness, examine the values informing their choices, renew their sense of purpose, and consider how their leadership might serve the wider good.  

For those supporting leaders, it offers a way to hold that space without prescribing easy answers. Windsor Leadership and the IDGs use different language, but they share a conviction: enduring change in organisations and society depends partly on the development of those who lead them. A risk register helps leaders see the complexity around them; inner development helps them meet it. 

Questions for reflection 

Which inner development goals (IDGs) do you most need to strengthen if you are to meet the complexity around you with greater wisdom and purpose? 

How might you create the conditions in which leaders can explore and develop these capacities for themselves, without prescribing easy answers? 

¹ Initiated in Sweden by the Ekskäret Foundation, the 29k Foundation, and The New Division, and then co-created with an international community of researchers and practitioners. The IDGs grew out of reflection on the difficulty of delivering the United Nations’ 17 interconnected Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), adopted in 2015 as an agenda for a more sustainable world by 2030.