The willingness crisis (and what organisations can do about it)

What the urgent value of opportunity cost teaches us about dealing with uncertainty.

There is a shortage happening in the workplace right now that nobody is talking about.

It’s not a shortage of talent or skills gap, or even engagement. Around the world, humanity is facing a willingness crisis. And nowhere is its absence on more merciless display than in the organisations that need it most.

I don’t mean the old-fashioned, soldier-through-it kind of willingness: the muscling through long hours, gritting of teeth and performative hustle that still passes for dedication in too many boardrooms.

What I’m talking about is something far more demanding: the willingness to do the things that are good and necessary for us. The things we know, somewhere in the gut, that need our attention but that we have become remarkably skilled at avoiding.

The only way to it is through it

I find it useful to think of what we perceive to be obstacles or challenges as initiations. Professional life offers no shortage of rites of passage, whether it’s dealing with a difficult colleague, falling short on a project or failing to lead with enough presence during a time of change. The things we need to embody most are invariably the ones that contain the truths we do not want to face in our private lives.

This is what makes work a continual initiation. We are invited, over and over, to grow at a slightly faster pace than would be comfortable. And most of us, most of the time, decline the invitation.

Incentive works for a time. A new role, a pay rise or a promotion help to kick off movement in the right direction. But before long, the middle slump arrives. The initial energy fades, the novelty wears thin and undead habits return from the shadows. Something more than financial reward or the gaining of prestige is required to push through to the end, particularly when the end is not even visible. This is the point where willingness is supposed to show up and, increasingly, it doesn’t.

To add salt to the wound, the current support structures of corporate life are ill-suited. They are not built for the long haul and not for any form of genuine uncertainty. Instead, we find ourselves caught between two tides of influence, both of which are failing us.

On one side sits the executive culture: the ruthless, zero-sum machinery of growth, big change and profit margin. Here, willingness is assumed. You either deliver or you’re replaced. There is no patience for the messiness of human development, only the clean lines of quarterly results.

On the other side sits the toothless tools of the human resources department, singing songs and slogans about the importance of equality, fairness and working together as though these were the only missing ingredients. Good intentions, most definitely. But in practice, a kind of organisational anaesthetic that numbs the very discomfort that growth requires.

Both, in their current form, are not only unhelpful but often dangerous to true progress. Because neither embodies what neither sees it needs.

What’s actually needed is something that cannot be mandated from above or workshopped from the side. It has to, and can only, come from the individual.

Willingness, in its most profound form, lives not in the mind or even the heart. It lives in the body, often in the stomach, that same region where dread and excitement are indistinguishable from one another. It is not an intellectual position or a callous mindset shift. It is a felt, physical energy that says: I will step toward this, even though I cannot yet see where it leads.

This is where willingness meets something most organisations have quietly abandoned: the opportunity cost of a lack of imagination.

We are, as a working culture, profoundly deficient in our ability to conceive of opportunity cost. Not in the financial sense (spreadsheets handle that well enough) but in the human sense. It’s the cost of the conversation we didn’t have or the hire we didn’t make. It’s the experiment we talked ourselves out of or the crucial, painful moment of honesty we swallowed because the meeting was already running long.

You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.

Everyone knows this. And yet, as with most great, simple wisdom, it hides in bald sight. We are remarkably unwilling to apply that logic when looking forward into an uncertain future, where it needed most. It is so much easier to look back and reverse-engineer our outcomes - so as to say, well, that needed to happen like that, or the right message came at the right time - than it is to extend that same trust to what hasn’t happened yet.

There are always far more decisions we don’t commit to than the ones we do. And in every one of those unchosen paths lives something we will never know about. To be willing is to be able to entertain situations and scenarios that are not even there yet, not as flights of fancy that pull us away from what’s urgent, but as genuine acts of imagination that expand what we believe is possible.

This is where willingness meets creativity, experimentation and real presence (not just leadership). This is why it must be driven at the individual level, because you are who you show up as - your education, interests, prejudices and desires, and no structure, however well-designed, can do this work for you.

The options are to either find it or create it where it does not yet exist.

This, I believe, is the major test that organisations of a certain size will face in the coming three to five years. Not disruption from AI or shifting markets: those are real, but they are external. The deeper threat is internal: the slow, imperceptible erosion of the willingness to try, to fail, to imagine something other than what is already in front of them. Get it right, and your business will live to fight another day (with the people who should stay). Get it wrong, and watch your market share and profits fall like a stone.

So what do we actually do about it?

The answer is not another change programme or a motivational offsite. It is something far simpler and (sorry about this) far harder: allowing your cultural mechanism to keep pace with your change mechanism.

Culture is, and has always been, the only indicator that matters in any kind of business change. How people show up and how they demonstrate to each other as a collective the value of showing up. This either spirals upward or it spirals downward. There is no standing still.

Here are three places to start:

Promote from within before you hire from without.

You probably already have enough diamonds in your team. The reflex to look externally for someone holding the supposed golden ticket is expensive, disruptive and usually the ticket never arrives. Instead, reinvest in the people you already have, and in particular, the younger and more junior members of your organisation.

Their proximity to the work, hunger to please and instinct for what’s broken give them an innovative power that far too many leaders overlook. You will be surprised how far promoting from within and genuinely celebrating those contributions will take you.

Make experimentation a standard KPI.

One new experiment per quarter, minimum. If you want to link it to incentive because you know incentive works, go ahead, but make the experimentation itself a cultural incentive, not merely a financial one. Let the individual step into the driving seat of the change you want them to lead. Let them own and shape it and help others create a cultural fabric that actually sticks.

Willingness grows when people are trusted to try things, not just told to execute them.

Any significant change, whether it’s adopting AI, pivoting into a new market, or radically shifting your product focus, will require the consent and creativity of the people who have to deliver it. Mandates are useless when they come from people who do not have to directly deliver on them.

Train your people to think in opportunity cost.

This is perhaps the most overlooked and most valuable of all. There is so much research and writing on how to not just teach the mental concept of opportunity cost but embed it into how standups, meetings, reports and one-to-ones are run between teams and managers. Being able to frame the opportunity not taken (rather than only what is visibly in front of us) is a cognitive skill that sharpens judgement, rewards curiosity and makes the willing indispensable.

The people who can think this way will stay and grow. The people who can’t, or won’t, will make that visible too.

None of this is easy. All of it is uncomfortable, which is precisely the point.

Willingness is not a soft skill. It is the most demanding and urgent level of initiation we face at the moment, and the one most conspicuously absent from the places that need it most.

The question is not whether your organisation can afford to develop it, but rather whether you can afford not to and whether you are willing to be the first one to step forward and find out.

Did this essay help you go deeper and get clearer? Subscribe to Humble Mind to receive weekly essays exploring meaningful work and meaningful becoming.