Within the global finance profession, CIMA (Chartered Institute of Management Accountants) has the responsibility for setting management accounting competency standards oriented towards business strategy. In alliance with the AICPA, CIMA facilitates the CGMA (Chartered Global Management Accountant) professional designation, ensuring that practitioners possess a universal business language for managing organisational performance. The Country Manager for CIMA in Indonesia is Mr Dwi Putra, a Coventry University alumnus who first identified me as a member of the ‘Order of the Phoenix’ because my iPhone lock screen displayed the classic Coventry University logo.
At CIMA’s invitation, on 12 February 2026, I delivered my presentation a CIMA Strategic Leaders Breakfast Talk at the Cyber 2 Building entitled “Leadership in the Age of Disruption — Strategic Leadership for Modern Finance Professionals”. The initial plan was for me to be the sole speaker; however, Mr M Fahmi El Mubarak, CEO of the BUMN School of Excellence, was later added to the programme. It was a real honour for me to share the stage with him.
As discussed at the briefing with CIMA, I explored disruption from the perspective of complexity. The discussion began with a deconstruction of neoclassical economic models, opening up insights into complexity economics. Business as a whole was reviewed as a Complex Adaptive System (CAS), i.e. a system comprising autonomous agents that interact and adapt without rigid, centralised control. The ecosystem is viewed as a dynamic interaction that generates new values non-linearly through the process of emergence.
From the perspective of complexity economics, disruption is not a nuisance but rather an engine of evolution, marking a qualitative shift in economic regimes. Strategy has moved from mere optimisation of old models towards a redesign of business architecture that prioritises learning speed and co-evolution with the ecosystem. Competitive advantage is no longer determined by scale or static efficiency, but by architectural flexibility in responding to internal and external feedback constantly.
Disruption also represents the optimal point for innovation to occur. We refer to this as the Edge of Chaos, which is the transition zone between order (stagnation) and disorder (chaos). In this zone, the system possesses the precise balance required to trigger innovation without descending into anarchy. Excessive order leads only to organisational stagnation, while total chaos results in systemic failure. The duty of leadership is to keep the organisation at this threshold to ensure sustainability through adaptive experimentation.
In an ecosystem model, the role of leadership is that of an ecologist. Leaders no longer micromanage outputs; instead, they are tasked with fostering a culture and environment that enables teams to self-organise. This approach utilises simple rules to guide autonomous decision-making, replacing rigid SOPs that are often too brittle to face ambiguity. Leaders must be courageous enough to engage in safe-to-fail probing: launching multiple small experiments simultaneously to detect strategic opportunities that traditional analytical models might overlook.
Returning to CIMA’s focus on Management Accounting (MA), MA plays a crucial role in governing strategic planning in this exponential era through the SPX framework from the IEEE. MA must be capable of performing Strategic Cost Management to monitor future horizons, utilising Real Options Analysis to value investments as strategic options, and implementing Agile Capital Budgeting. By moving away from rigid annual budgets towards Rolling Forecasts and Throughput Accounting, MA ensures that resource allocation is based on real-time feedback and the velocity of value conversion.
In closing, it was conveyed that disruption must be managed as a catalyst for achieving sustainability and a better quality of life. We must stop viewing business as a machine to be controlled mechanistically and start managing it as a living ecosystem with the capacity to renew itself continually. Furthermore, the finest innovations are those capable of creating new markets and providing a tangible impact on strengthening the economy of society.
