Future Skills for Leading Change in Disruptive Digital Times: An Exploratory Review

The global business view faces a shift caused by simultaneous digital and green transitions. This exploratory review investigates the evolution of future skills required to drive change in disruptive times. The current literature highlights a transition from the traditional knowledge age to a post-knowledge era where static qualifications are secondary to the self-organized capacity to act in certain contexts. The research covers an exploratory review methodology, integrating qualitative conceptual frameworks and stakeholder interviews with quantitative statistical data sourced from international labor surveys. The study addresses four primary research questions: the evolution of skills taxonomies, the definition of the disruption gap between technological adoption and human development, the establishment of a skill hierarchy for the upcoming decade, and how future skills apply to social entrepreneurship. The main results identify six distinct skill profiles organized within a Triple Helix model comprising subjective, object-oriented, and world-related dimensions. The findings suggest that self-organization is the essential meta-competence for navigating emergent work contexts, and that business excellence now requires a transition from basic technical literacy to ethical artificial intelligence competency and sustainability leadership. These results imply that traditional preparatory education models are no longer sufficient and must be replaced by reflective, laboratory-based learning. This paper contributes a novel conceptual architecture to the field by defining the disruption gap as a mismatch in agility rather than a mere curriculum lag. It provides a comprehensive framework for practitioners and policymakers to bridge the space between rapid technological innovation and human skill maturity, establishing a foundation for organizational resilience and human-centric progress in Industry five point zero (Industry 5.0).