Why the leaders who come out ahead treat disruption as the moment to build
THE BOTTOM LINEMost F&B technical leaders were trained and promoted for a single discipline: making the unpredictable predictable. When today’s disruptions break that model, the instinct is to defend it. The leaders who come out ahead do something different. They treat the same disruption as the moment they get to build the next version of their organization, and new research on identity leadership shows exactly what separates the two.
For a Vice President of R&D, Engineering, Innovation, or any technical function in Food and Beverage, predictability is not a preference. It is the job. Batch consistency, spec compliance, validated process, statistical control, these are the tools that built a career and the standards that earned a promotion. Change leadership consulting exists because this discipline, so essential to running a plant or a lab, becomes a liability the moment the ground itself starts moving.
That is precisely what today’s environment is doing. Economic volatility, uneven returns on AI investment, and a workforce that trusts fewer institutions than it did even two years ago are converging on the same technical leaders who spent their careers eliminating variability. Their reflex, understandably, is to defend the model that got them here. Hold the line. Protect the process. Wait for stability to return before making a move.
Most leaders treat chaos as something to survive. A rare few treat it as the moment they get to lead.
The rare few who play offense
The leaders who thrive in disruption are not rejecting the discipline that built their credibility. They still want reproducibility, and they know their organizations need it to function. What separates them is a recognition that the path back to a stable state runs through a period where the old playbook simply does not apply yet. Someone has to build the next version of the process. Someone has to decide what the new normal looks like before it exists. These leaders volunteer for that role instead of waiting for someone above them to hand it down.
The leaders who thrive in chaos are building the next version of rigor, while everyone else waits to be handed one.
This is not a personality trait or a tolerance for risk. It is a leadership choice, and it is one that research on organizational change is now able to describe with some precision.
What separates them
A recent review published in the Journal of Change Management reframes how researchers think about organizational disruption. For years, the dominant question was how to reduce the threat that change poses to people’s sense of who they are at work. The newer finding is that the same disruption can do the opposite. It can sharpen and strengthen that sense of identity, clarifying what the organization is becoming rather than only what it is at risk of losing, if leaders approach it the right way.
The separation comes down to something simple. Leaders who only defend against change give people nothing to hold onto except what they are at risk of losing. Leaders who play offense give people something to build toward, a version of the organization and their own role in it that is better than what came before.
This is not theoretical. Research following a Swiss pharmaceutical merger tracked more than two hundred employees before and eighteen months after the change took effect. Where managers actively built a shared sense of what the merged organization stood for, employees developed a genuinely positive new identity within it, and that translated into stronger integration outcomes over time. The managers who did this were not softening the change or minimizing what was different. They were giving people a “we” worth becoming part of.
As the VP of R&D, Engineering or Innovation, the three specific red flags to watch for that indicate your organization has a change implementation challenge that requires meaningful action include: too much head nodding when you know there’s dissent, mysterious delays in timelines, and an entrenched culture unwilling to change.
The cost of getting this wrong, at scale
The 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer offers a sobering look at what happens when that offense never gets on the field. Trust has moved beyond grievance into what Edelman now calls insularity, a retreat into narrower and more defensive versions of identity across nearly every population studied. Inside organizations, this shows up in stark terms. Substantial numbers of employees say they would rather change departments than work for a manager who sees things differently than they do.
That same research found employers sitting in an unusual position of strength. The workplace remains one of the few institutions people still trust, well ahead of business in general and government by wide margins. Employees are, in effect, waiting for their own leaders to be the ones who offer something worth rallying around. When that offense does not show up, people default to defense on their own, and an organization ends up with a workforce protecting smaller and smaller versions of itself instead of building toward a shared one.
The leadership move
The leaders who get this right do a specific thing. They align their people to a purpose that the disruption itself makes newly possible, not a purpose that predates it and simply needs protecting. They make it explicit, out loud and often, how the actions they are asking of people serve that purpose. This is not about eliminating uncertainty. Uncertainty is the raw material these leaders work with. It is about giving people something to build rather than only something to defend.
The organizations telling a different story three years from now will be the ones led by someone who played offense while the field around them played defense. Organizations in the Food and Beverage industry achieving the strongest measurable results are using three critical approaches to solve this challenge: implementing employee user groups, assessing capability gaps and designing elements to drive behavior change.
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Charlotte Allen is the Founder and CEO of Rebel Success for Leaders, a boutique change leadership consulting firm partnering with Fortune 500 and mid-market food and beverage organizations. We help leaders build the change leadership capability that makes critical initiatives stick, so teams adopt them and they are still in play 6 to 12 months after implementation.
