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How Forgotten Wisdom Is Creating a Global Crisis of Consequence
The most dangerous leaders aren’t those who make bad decisions—they’re those who’ve forgotten why good decisions matter.
Three weeks ago, I wrote an article for the Globe and Mail about what may be one of the most fiscally reckless laws in modern U.S. history. The “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” will add an estimated US$3.3 trillion to the national debt over the next decade while raising the debt ceiling by US$5 trillion—the largest increase ever. Last week, I had the chance to dig deeper into these themes as a guest in a podcast interview, exploring what this fiscal recklessness reveals about a much deeper crisis.
The troubling part isn’t just the scale of the spending. It’s what the bill reveals about a crisis that should concern every leader and advisor: we’re forgetting the hard-won lessons that built our prosperity.
This isn’t just an American problem. It’s a warning about what happens when institutional memory fails and leadership loses its anchor to consequence. For those of us leading and guiding organizations, managing wealth, or stewarding resources, understanding this pattern may be key to protecting what we’ve built in an increasingly fragile world.
When Wells Fargo Forgot Who They Were
For over 150 years, Wells Fargo was the model of conservative banking. Their leaders understood something fundamental: trust takes generations to build and only moments to destroy. They focused on clients, not quotas. They grew steadily, not recklessly. They remembered what happened when banks got careless.
But by the 2000s, a new generation was in charge—leaders who had never lived through bank failures or financial panics. Aggressive sales targets replaced client focus. The institutional memory that had guided the bank for over a century was dismissed as outdated thinking. The result? Employees opened millions of fake accounts to hit impossible quotas. A century and a half of brand equity collapsed in less than five years.
This wasn’t just corporate greed—it was institutional amnesia. The leaders making decisions had never experienced the consequences of their predecessors’ hard-learned lessons.
Sound familiar? The same pattern is playing out in governments, corporations, and organizations worldwide. Leaders who built postwar prosperity lived through the Depression and World War II. Fiscal discipline wasn’t economic theory to them—it was survival instinct. Today’s decision-makers have only known abundance. They’ve never seen what happens when debt spirals out of control and institutions lose public trust.
The Fourth Turning: Why This Pattern Keeps Repeating
As I discussed in last week’s interview, historians William Strauss and Neil Howe identified this cycle in their groundbreaking work The Fourth Turning. Every 80-90 years, societies pass through four generational phases, ending in crisis—the “Fourth Turning”—when old institutions break down and must be rebuilt.
The pattern is remarkably consistent:
- The generation that fought the Revolutionary War created the U.S. Constitution
- Their great-grandchildren endured the Civil War
- That generation rebuilt the Union, only for their great-grandchildren to face the Depression and World War II
- The Greatest Generation, as they are now known, established the modern world order
- Today, their great-grandchildren are watching those very institutions falter again
We’re living through another Fourth Turning. The question isn’t whether another crisis is coming—it’s whether today’s leaders will be ready when it arrives.
The Math That Doesn’t Lie
The numbers I detailed in the July 9th Globe article tell a sobering story. With the passing of the One Big Beautiful Bill, the U.S. is expected to spend almost US$1 trillion annually on interest payments—about US$2.6 billion every single day—just to service existing debt. That already exceeds the entire defence budget. By 2034, interest expenses are projected to hit US$1.7 trillion, more than current Social Security spending.
But as I emphasized in the podcast interview, Canadians shouldn’t feel superior. Ontario’s debt alone exceeds $408 billion CAD, making it the largest subnational borrower in the world. That’s ~ four times larger than California at ~$75 billion USD and New York at $64 billion USD—and they have roughly double Ontario’s population. Interest payments are already crowding out essential investments in healthcare, education, and infrastructure.
As David Wessel from the Brookings Institution warns: “This is like ignoring rust on a bridge. It won’t matter today, but someday it will. In finance, as in infrastructure, cracks rarely fix themselves.”
The CASE for Leadership in Uncertain Times
This institutional memory crisis demands a different kind of leadership—what I call “the Uncertainty Advantage.” These leaders don’t just manage risk; they understand complexity and interconnection. They move beyond headlines, quarterly earnings calendars and election cycles to focus on long-term stewardship.
This is where leaders can (and should) use my CASE Foundation to navigate structural uncertainty:
CONTROL: Focus on What You Can Actually Change Stop obsessing over market volatility, political chaos, or global events you can’t influence. Leaders with the Uncertainty Advantage direct energy toward controllable factors: their organization’s culture, financial discipline, talent development, and strategic positioning. They ask, “What’s one thing we can adjust today to feel more secure about tomorrow?”
ALIGN: Connect Actions with Priorities When external frameworks wobble, your internal compass becomes your greatest asset. You can’t say fiscal prudence is a priority and then take no action in line with that commitment. Leaders who thrive in uncertainty maintain unwavering commitment to their stated priorities while adapting their methods. Like Amazon’s customer obsession or Netflix’s streaming pivot—clear priorities, flexible execution.
SPAN: Bridge Multiple Time Horizons Most leaders plan for the next quarter. Exceptional leaders think across immediate needs, medium-term goals, and long-term success simultaneously. They make decisions that work today while building capacity for tomorrow’s challenges.
ESTABLISH: Measure What Truly Matters During institutional breakdown, traditional metrics often mislead. Leaders need frameworks that track genuine progress toward long-term resilience, not just short-term performance. They establish success metrics that go beyond the next earnings call to measure what truly matters for organizational survival.
Practical Steps for Leaders and Advisors
For Business Leaders:
- Audit your institutional memory: Who in your organization remembers your last major crisis? What lessons are documented vs. just stored in departing leaders’ heads?
- Stress-test your assumptions: Run scenarios where your biggest revenue stream disappears, key talent leaves, or regulatory changes disrupt your model.
- Build adaptive capacity: Invest in people who can navigate ambiguity, not just execute existing plans.
For Financial Advisors:
- Reduce single-system exposure: As I noted in the Globe article, many Canadian portfolios are essentially tethered to two countries (Canada/U.S.). Global diversification isn’t betting against home—it’s not tying client futures to any single framework.
- Focus on durability over performance: Help clients build portfolios for institutional and systemic uncertainty, not just market volatility.
- Educate on structural vs. cyclical change: This isn’t just another downturn—it’s systemic pressure requiring different thinking.
For All Leaders:
- Understand the difference between risk and uncertainty: Risk is measurable—we can calculate the probability of market volatility, estimate the likelihood of interest rate changes, or model various economic scenarios based on historical data. Uncertainty is fundamentally different—it represents unknown unknowns where we can’t even identify all the variables, let alone calculate probabilities. Market corrections are risk that we can prepare for. COVID-19 was pure uncertainty—few leaders had pandemic protocols because few imagined a global lockdown.
- Expect uncertainty to accelerate, not diminish: Our interconnected world means that disruptions cascade faster and in more unpredictable ways than ever before. A supply chain disruption in one country ripples globally within days. A social media trend can topple decades-old business models overnight. Geopolitical tensions instantly affect energy prices, currency markets, and consumer behavior worldwide. The pace of technological change, demographic shifts, and institutional breakdown means we’re entering an era of permanent uncertainty.
- Build systems for the unknown, not just the predictable: Traditional risk management assumes you can map out scenarios and assign probabilities. Uncertainty management requires building organizational resilience that works regardless of what specific challenges emerge. This means developing people who think adaptively, creating decision-making frameworks that function with incomplete information, and maintaining financial and operational buffers that provide options when the unexpected hits.
- Practice productive paranoia: Regularly ask, “What storms might be coming? How would we adapt if our current advantages disappeared?” But then go further—ask what you haven’t even thought to worry about yet. The leaders who survived COVID best weren’t necessarily those who had pandemic plans, but those who had built flexible, resilient organizations that could pivot quickly to any major disruption.
- Document institutional knowledge: The most valuable lessons often walk out the door with retiring leaders. But focus especially on capturing how previous leaders navigated genuine uncertainty—not just managed known risks.
- Create decision frameworks for uncertainty: Build systems that guide responses without requiring perfect information. In an uncertain world, the ability to make good decisions quickly with limited data becomes more valuable than the ability to make perfect decisions slowly with complete information.
The Uncertainty Advantage
Here’s what I’ve learned from working with leaders who thrive during crises: they don’t just survive change—they use uncertainty as a competitive advantage. While others panic or freeze, they adapt. While competitors cling to old models, they evolve.
The organizations that master this principle don’t just survive these pressures—they emerge stronger. They understand that prosperity isn’t permanent—it’s something each generation must earn.
If today’s decisions feel harder than they used to, it’s not just you—it’s the complexity we’re all navigating. I created The Uncertainty Advantage to help leaders move forward when the future won’t cooperate.
📥 Get the free guide: The Uncertainty Advantage—a decision-making framework for leaders navigating change. This guide offers a preview of my forthcoming book on mastering uncertainty, a practical guide to thriving when the world is constantly changing, due out this fall.
A Personal Reflection on Adaptation
Throughout my career, I’ve witnessed how the most successful leaders are rarely those with perfect plans—they’re the ones who adapt when their plans inevitably meet reality. Whether it’s navigating multiple career transitions, building businesses across different countries, or tackling physical challenges that push personal boundaries, the pattern remains consistent: the ability to make sound decisions amid uncertainty is what separates those who thrive from those who merely survive.
This isn’t about eliminating uncertainty—that’s impossible. It’s about developing the capacity to move forward despite it. Every major transition teaches the same lesson: change is a core feature of life, but how we respond to it determines our trajectory.
The leaders and organizations that master this principle understand that institutional memory isn’t just about preserving the past—it’s about learning from it to navigate an uncertain future. As I concluded in my Globe article: “The question isn’t whether another turning is coming—it’s whether we’ll be ready when it does.”
When you are ready, direct message me and I can help you with
- Speaking Engagements & Workshops designed for your team and clients
- Tailored, high-impact Consulting and Coaching Services for your practice
Check out my podcast and other resources at www.samsivarajan.com
