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The first instinct is to give up.
Your chest is compressed, you are exhausted, and the opponent on top of you is actively trying to finish the fight. The body begins to make its case before the mind does: give up so we can BREATHE!
In Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu (BJJ—a grappling art), this is a common part of the education process. The lesson is more about composure than courage. Force rarely helps; panic narrows your options. So you relax, defend, conserve energy, and wait. Eventually, the pressure shifts. A small opening appears. You use leverage, reverse the position and, to your opponent’s surprise, finish them with a choke.
I have trained BJJ for over 10 years and worked with executives as a leadership adviser for more than twice as long. The boardroom and the mat are different worlds. But one parallel has become increasingly clear: transformation is rarely the result of intellectual understanding alone. It is forged through confronting conditions that demand change and building the capacity to adapt. In that sense, leaders are grappling with much the same challenge: how to respond when the conditions around them refuse to stay still.
This tension is clearly playing out in conversations around AI. Many organizations are trying to understand what artificial intelligence will mean for their businesses, their people and their operating models. Russell Reynolds Associates' H1 2026 Global Leadership Monitor found that 91% of leaders have taken steps toward adopting AI, and 35% use it in day-to-day workflows, yet fewer than a quarter report positive profitability or revenue impacts as a result. Adoption is spreading faster than organizational transformation.
Our view is that lasting transformation begins with leadership. Technology matters, but it rarely transforms an organization unless leaders are prepared to rethink the system around it.
That raises a broader challenge. The objective cannot simply be to execute the transformation in front of us. Strategies, technologies, business models and stakeholder expectations will continue to change. Organizations increasingly need the capacity to sense shifts early, decide what they mean, reconfigure how work gets done, mobilize people, and learn and renew through action.
Similarly, in BJJ, progress does not come from mastering one move or succeeding in one match. It comes from repeatedly encountering resistance, recognizing when an approach no longer works, adjusting in real time, and learning from the outcome. Over time, the practitioner becomes better not at handling one specific situation, but at adapting across many unfamiliar ones.
The real test of a transformation may be whether it leaves the organization more capable of navigating the next one. BJJ illustrates how that capacity gets built.
For a business to transform, leaders must let go. BJJ taught me a similar lesson.
BJJ strips away illusion quickly. When you first start, almost everyone is better than you. People smaller, older and less physically imposing can control you. Strength helps, though not as much as expected. Status outside the gym has little value once the round begins. The feedback is immediate and difficult to rationalize.
If a practitioner cannot accept being beaten, they usually quit or refuse to concede a lost position and get injured. The tap, the signal that a submission has worked, is often misunderstood as defeat.
In reality, it’s just feedback: this path has ended. Learn from it, reset, and begin again.
The same principle applies to leadership, though the consequences are less visible in the moment. Many leaders are promoted because a particular playbook worked. Then the role changes, the market shifts or a new technology alters the economics of the business, and the playbook that created success becomes a liability.
Humility means recognizing that you may no longer have the right answer and allowing other signals, perspectives and ideas to reach you. Under pressure, many leaders revert to the habits that made them successful. BJJ makes the cost plain: if you force your go-to move when it is no longer available, you waste energy. If you deny that you are in danger, you get submitted.
This has been one of the longer lessons of my own training. For years, there were things I could do on the mat that eventually my back stopped tolerating. I spent some time resisting that reality. Eventually, injury made my choices obvious: quit, keep trying to use the same style and hurt myself further, or adopt a different approach. Progress sometimes means accepting that the path you preferred is no longer available.
Leaders face the same challenge. A new role, strategy or environment can require something different; behavior that made them effective before can become limiting next.
Another BJJ lesson is increasingly relevant to continual change: great instructors teach more than moves.
Techniques matter, particularly early on. But the best coaches help practitioners understand concepts: how to manage distance, create leverage, and recognize danger and openings as situations unfold. The objective is not to reproduce the coach's personal style. Different bodies, strengths and limitations require different styles.
The goal is to give practitioners enough understanding to build their own.
No one can prepare for every situation in advance. You cannot memorize a response for every opponent or position. Progress eventually depends on understanding principles deeply enough to apply them when circumstances differ from anything you have seen before.
The same is true of leadership and organizational transformation. Leaders cannot be handed a fixed playbook for every disruption. Frameworks, expertise and outside perspective can help, as can coaches and advisers who see patterns leaders may not yet see. But the objective should be greater capability inside the organization, not greater dependence on expertise outside it.
No one truly learns BJJ by watching videos. Instruction and observation can accelerate understanding, but learning ultimately requires live practice. You test an idea against resistance, discover where your understanding breaks and return with a better approach.
Organizations need similar learning loops. Leaders develop through consequential work: making real decisions, testing assumptions, learning from outcomes and becoming better able to adapt the next time conditions change.
Andrew Wilson, chief executive of Electronic Arts and a BJJ black belt, observed in a 2024 Fast Company interview that a smaller player with the right technique, preparation and planning does not have to fear a larger one, while larger incumbents should not dismiss smaller, better-trained rivals.
Size can deceive, and past advantage can dull awareness. Scale remains powerful, but it is not immunity. A smaller company that adapts more quickly can defeat a larger, established opponent.
That leads to a different question for companies facing successive waves of disruption. Not only: Do we have leaders capable of delivering this transformation? But: Are we building an organization that gets better at transforming?
• Do leaders reward humility or only certainty?
• Can information travel upward when it challenges established assumptions?
• Can leaders make difficult choices when new information challenges the existing playbook?
• Can roles, capabilities and ways of working change as circumstances change?
• Can leaders throughout the organization solve problems without waiting for instructions from above?
• Is failure treated as information, or as reputational risk?
In the age of AI transformation, BJJ is a useful reminder that adaptive capacity is built through repeated encounters with reality: pressure, resistance, feedback, adjustment and another attempt.
The real test is not whether leaders can navigate the disruption in front of them, but whether, through doing so, they leave behind an organization better able to navigate the next one.
Mehrdad Derayeh is a senior member of Russell Reynolds Associates’ Transformation practice. He is based in Toronto and New York.
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