There is a comforting little lie in many leadership cultures: if you are senior enough, smart enough, resourced enough, you can make the world behave. Not perfectly, but predictably.
That is the deal people half-believe when they chase authority. It is also the deal boards quietly sell when they hire a new chief executive: you will bring order.
Then uncertainty shows up and, with the casual cruelty of weather, it takes the deal away.
Markets slide for reasons nobody can pin down. A regulator changes its mind. A war kicks off, and shipping routes go awry. A cyber incident happens to your supplier, not you, and your factory still stops.
A competitor ships a product that makes your two-year roadmap look quaint. A new technology lands with a dull thud at first, then begins to hum like an old air conditioner that will not stop. You cannot control the outcome. The “what” refuses to be managed.
And that is when a different kind of leadership begins. Not the sort that is about pulling levers and presenting tidy certainty. The sort that is about character.
I do not mean character in the cheesy, poster-on-the-wall sense. I mean the boring, daily, unglamorous “how” people experience when the plan stops working: how you make decisions when the data is thin, how you treat colleagues when everyone is a bit frightened.
How do you talk when you do not know?
How do you hold the tension between speed and care?
How you behave when nobody is watching because everyone is too busy panicking.
Uncertainty makes you a mirror. It reflects back who you are, or at least who you default to when you are tired and under pressure.
That reflection is often less flattering than the version you present at town halls.
Senior leaders tend to dislike this framing because it feels soft. They want a framework, a playbook, a process. Fair. But here is the catch: in uncertainty, your playbook is only as useful as the person holding it. Your process is only as good as your discipline under stress. Your strategy is only as credible as your honesty.
So let us talk about what senior leaders can actually do when the “what” is unstable. The goal is not to make uncertainty disappear.
The goal is to stop being surprised by your own reactions, and to build an organisation that can move without pretending.
The Quiet Panic at the Top
Most executives will privately admit that uncertainty feels personal. It is not just an external condition. It pokes at identity.
If you have spent twenty years being rewarded for answers, it is unsettling to live in questions. If you have built a reputation on competence, it is uncomfortable to say, out loud, “I do not know.” If your operating model is built on control, it is hard to accept that control is now partial.
This is why uncertainty often triggers strange leadership behaviours. You see a sudden hunger for precision.
The organisation starts demanding forecasts with extra decimal points, as if the extra digits will tame the world.
You see meeting inflation: more check-ins, more calls, more “quick alignments.”
You see a particular kind of aggression in language: “We need to get ahead of this.” “We need to own the narrative.” “We need to drive accountability.”
Sometimes, what that really means is: I feel exposed.
And because senior leaders are visible, their coping behaviours become culture. If the top team cannot sit with ambiguity, the rest of the organisation learns to fake certainty. People start telling you what they think you want to hear.
The bad news arrives late, dressed up. The organisation becomes less truthful precisely when it needs truth most.
You can feel this in the room. A board meeting in uncertain times has a distinct atmosphere: the shuffle of papers, the over-polished slides, the way people talk slightly faster.
Everyone is trying to sound in control. The human body does not believe it.
If you want one practical diagnostic: watch your own relationship with silence. In uncertainty, leaders often fill every gap.
Silence feels like weakness. But silence can be discipline. It is a small sign that you are not performing for certainty’s sake.
Two Kinds of Uncertainty, Two Kinds of Work
Senior leaders often lump uncertainty into one blob. That is a mistake, because it leads to the wrong response. There is uncertainty that can be reduced, and uncertainty that cannot.
Some uncertainty is about missing information.
You can run experiments, collect data, and narrow the range.
You can talk to customers, explore supply options, test pricing, and model scenarios. This is practical, analytic work.
Other uncertainty is structural. The system is changing in ways that cannot be fully predicted, and you are living inside it. No amount of analysis will make it clean.
You can reduce risk at the margins, but you cannot convert it into a spreadsheet. This is where character and judgement come in, because you will have to act without closure.
The trick is not to become mystical about it. It is to be precise about which kind you are facing in each decision.
A senior leader I know in industrial manufacturing described it like this: “I can be uncertain about which supplier will deliver on time next month, and I can reduce that by diversifying and doing proper diligence.
But I cannot be certain about geopolitical alignment over the next three years. That is a different animal. If I treat it like a supplier problem, I will waste time.”
It sounds obvious. In practice, leaders do the opposite when stressed: they treat structural uncertainty as if it is missing information, because that feels solvable.
They demand more analysis. They kick decisions down the road. They hold out for certainty that will never arrive.
And then they are surprised when the organisation stalls.
Your Job is not certain. Your Job is Direction.
In stable times, senior leaders can confuse certainty with leadership. If you can predict outcomes, you can look decisive.
You can also be sloppy about the difference between confidence and competence, because the environment forgives you.
In uncertain times, leadership is less about confidence and more about direction. Direction is not a forecast.
It is a set of choices about what matters, what you stand for, and what you will do next, even if you might be wrong.
Direction has three ingredients.
The first is a small set of genuine priorities, not a list of twelve “strategic pillars.” In uncertainty, the cost of spreading attention is brutal. Every extra priority is a lie you tell yourself about capacity.
The second is a way of deciding, so people are not waiting for permission. This is where many senior leaders quietly fail: they remain the bottleneck, even as they complain about bureaucracy.
They want speed but keep decision rights central because letting go feels risky. The result is slower decisions and more political behaviour, because everyone tries to manage the bottleneck.
The third is a set of behavioural signals that tell people how to act when the situation is messy. That is where character stops being abstract and becomes operational.
People often ask, “How do I build resilience?” Honestly, resilience is a bit of a slippery word. What most organisations need is not resilience as toughness.
They need resilience, the ability to stay honest and coordinated under stress. That is a behavioural problem.
The “How” is Not Soft. It is the Only Thing People Can Copy.
When outcomes are unclear, people copy what they can see. They copy your mood. They capture your attention. They copy how you treat dissent. They copy what gets rewarded.
So the “how” becomes a management system in disguise.
Here are a few “how” behaviours that matter more than leaders expect.
How you talk about what you know, and what you do not. The most practical phrase in uncertainty is also the most underused: “Here is what we know. Here is what we do not know. Here is what we are doing to find out.” That sentence calms people because it provides structure without pretending to be something it isn’t.
How you respond to bad news. If your first reaction is to blame, people will protect you from reality. You will get optimism instead of facts. If your first reaction is to ask, “What do we need to understand?” you will get earlier signals next time. In uncertainty, early signals are gold.
How you handle disagreement. Many senior teams claim to want challenge, but only when it comes dressed politely and late enough that it does not threaten momentum. In uncertain conditions, you need dissent early, while it is still cheap. That means you need to make it socially safe to say, “I think we are wrong.” Not endlessly, not performatively, but genuinely.
How do you make trade-offs visible? Uncertainty creates hidden trade-offs. If you do not name them, people assume you are avoiding them. Saying, “We are choosing speed over perfection here,” or “We are choosing cash over growth for two quarters,” is not weakness. It is clarity.
How you treat your own nervous system. This sounds personal, but it is organisational. If you are running on fumes, you will make worse decisions, and you will leak anxiety. People can hear it in your voice. It is oddly physical. The sharper your stress, the narrower your attention. Under uncertainty, attention is the scarce asset. Sleep and space are not indulgences. They are governance.
Example One: The CEO Who Could Not Stop Forecasting
A retail CEO I worked with during a period of volatile consumer demand kept asking for forecast updates. Daily. Sometimes twice daily.
The finance team started producing variations: “best case,” “base case,” “stress case,” “apocalypse case.” It became a ritual, like checking the weather app every five minutes during a storm.
In meetings, the CEO would latch onto tiny shifts in the numbers and treat them as meaningful.
People complied because the CEO was the CEO. But what happened in practice was subtle and damaging.
First, the business started optimising for the forecast rather than for reality. Teams delayed decisions waiting for “the next set of numbers,” which were never stable.
Second, the organisation learned that the safest posture was to be vague, because precision created accountability for a world that was not behaving.
Third, people became cynical. They could feel the theatre.
Eventually, a blunt operations director said, “We are behaving like the forecast is the business. It is not. Stores are the business.”
That moment mattered because it forced a shift from pseudo-control to direction. The CEO stopped daily forecasting meetings.
They set weekly decision checkpoints instead, tied to specific triggers: footfall changes, supplier lead times, and cash thresholds.
They agreed on what would change their mind. And they put energy into things they could actually influence: inventory mix, promotional pacing, store staffing.
The result was not certain. But the organisation moved again.
The lesson is not “stop forecasting.” Forecasting matters. The lesson is: do not use forecasting as emotional regulation.
If you are asking for more numbers because you are anxious, you are recruiting the whole organisation into your anxiety.
The Discipline of “Decision Triggers”
One of the most useful tools in uncertainty is embarrassingly simple: decision triggers.
A decision trigger is a pre-agreed condition that will cause you to act. It is how you avoid endless debate and late panic.
For instance: “If customer churn rises above X for two consecutive months, we pause hiring in non-revenue roles.”
Or, “If our main supplier lead time exceeds Y weeks, we switch product configurations.”
Or, “If regulatory guidance changes in this direction, we stop investing in this product line and move resources.”
Triggers do two things. They reduce dithering, and they reduce political argument because you are not re-litigating the decision every week. You agreed to the rule in advance.
There is also a character angle here. Triggers require you to admit you do not know what will happen, and to build a response anyway. That is mature leadership: not pretending, but preparing.
Example Two: The FD Who Wanted to Be Loved
This one is uncomfortable because it is common.
A FD in a professional services firm faced a sharp downturn. Utilisation dropped. Projects paused. The numbers were ugly. The FD had to recommend cost reductions, including headcount.
But the FD also cared deeply about being liked. That is not inherently bad; it can make someone humane. The problem was that the FD avoided directness.
They spoke in euphemisms. They delayed. They tried to soften every edge. They told themselves they were protecting people.
In reality, the lack of clarity created more fear. Partners started gossiping. Managers gave false reassurance because they had no real information.
People could sense something was coming, but did not know what. That is the worst kind of uncertainty: the kind caused by silence.
Eventually, the MD and FD agreed on a different approach. The FD did a short, direct all-hands: “Revenue is down. Cash is still strong, but we need to protect it. We will reduce costs, including people costs. Here is the timeline. Here is what we are doing to support those affected.” It was humane.
The FD later said something that stuck with me: “I realised I was using kindness as an excuse to avoid discomfort.”
That is the mirror again. Uncertainty revealed a personal need (approval) that was shaping organisational behaviour. Once it was named, the FD could choose differently.
The Honest Caveat: Not Every “How” Works Everywhere
Some of what I am describing will not land the same way in every culture.
If you lead in a context where public admission of uncertainty is punished, you will need to calibrate how you communicate.
If you operate in a high-risk environment such as aviation or healthcare, you face constraints that make “move fast” a dangerous slogan.
If you are in a company with fragile trust, transparency can trigger panic if it is not paired with clear action.
So do not turn “be honest” into performative vulnerability. People do not need your inner monologue. They need enough truth to orient themselves, and enough structure to act.
There is also a real risk of over-rotating into “values talk” as a substitute for decisions. You can have the best intentions in the world and still fail if you do not make the hard calls. Character is not a replacement for competence. It is what makes competence usable under stress.
You Need a Different Relationship with Time
In uncertainty, leaders often get trapped in two time horizons: today and forever.
Today is urgent. Forever is the long-term vision. The middle disappears. That is where most strategy actually lives: the next six to twelve months.
If you only operate in today, you become reactive. If you only operate in forever, you become disconnected and oddly irrelevant, like someone describing a beautiful future while the building is on fire.
Good senior leadership in uncertainty manages three clocks at once.
There is the immediate clock: what must happen in the next two weeks to stop damage.
There is the adaptation clock: what must change over the next two to three quarters so the organisation is not just surviving but learning.
And there is the identity clock: what must remain true about who we are, even as we change.
Identity is not branding. It is what your people recognise as “us.” Under uncertainty, identity can be an anchor or a prison.
Some companies cling to identity and refuse to adapt. Others discard it and lose coherence. The skill is to separate core principles from old habits.
Example Three: The Product Leader Who Kept Changing the Message
A senior product leader at a technology firm faced a sudden competitive threat. A rival launched a similar feature set at a lower price, with better user experience.
Panic followed.
The leadership team began reworking the strategy weekly.
The product leader, trying to keep up, constantly changed the message: “We are focusing on enterprise.” Next week: “We are doubling down on mid-market.” Then: “We are going platform-first.”
Employees stopped listening. They could not tell if the leader was adapting or flailing.
Eventually, someone in a frontline sales team said, with a weary laugh, “Just tell us what not to do.”
That comment revealed something. Under uncertainty, clarity is often about constraints, not grand visions. People can handle change if they know the boundaries.
The product leader reset. They did not announce a shiny new strategy. They said: “We will not chase price cuts. We will not build bespoke features for individual customers. We will focus on three user problems, and we will ship improvements every fortnight.” That was it. The organisation could work with that.
The leader still adjusted over time, but the adjustments were within a stable frame. That is the direction.
The Board, the Investors, and the Pressure to Perform Certainty
Senior leaders are not leading in a vacuum. Boards want reassurance. Investors want a story. Analysts want a number. The media wants a quote. Customers want reliability. Employees want safety. Everyone, in their own way, wants you to be certain.
Senior leadership becomes a kind of acting. The danger is that you start believing your own performance.
You can give stakeholders confidence without lying. Confidence comes from coherence, not certainty. It comes from showing you have thought about scenarios, that you have clear priorities, that you have the capacity to execute, and that you will adjust when facts change.
A practical way to do this is to stop over-promising outcomes and start over-communicating principles and actions.
Instead of “We will achieve X no matter what,” you say, “We are aiming for X, and here are the actions we are taking. If these conditions shift, here is how we will respond.” That is not weak. It is an adult.
Boards, especially, often respond well to this if it is delivered with calm authority. Many boards have lived through enough cycles to know that false certainty is a smell.
The Personal Work Nobody Writes About
Here is the part that usually stays off the agenda.
Uncertainty forces you to confront your own default settings: your appetite for risk, your need for control, your tolerance for conflict, your relationship with status, and your ability to disappoint people.
Senior leadership roles are excellent at rewarding your strengths and hiding your weaknesses. Uncertainty does the opposite: it amplifies weaknesses.
If you tend to avoid conflict, uncertainty will produce more conflict than you can avoid.
If you tend to over-control, uncertainty will produce more variables than you can hold.
If you tend to chase approval, uncertainty will force decisions that make you unpopular.
If you tend to intellectualise, uncertainty will ask for action before you have finished thinking.
You can pretend this is not true. You can treat uncertainty as purely external. But your organisation will feel your defaults anyway. Better to bring them into the light.
One small practice I have seen help: a senior leader asks a trusted colleague, monthly, “When I am under pressure, what do I do that makes your job harder?” It is a horrible question. It is also a useful one.
The colleague will usually answer with something like, “You stop listening,” or “You start changing priorities,” or “You get sharp and dismissive.” Those are not strategic issues.
They are character issues. And they are changeable, if you want them to be.
What to Do on Monday Morning
You can read all of this and still wonder what to do when you walk into the office, and your calendar is a mess, and everyone wants decisions.
So here are a handful of moves that are practical and, importantly, doable without a reinvention of your personality.
Start by writing down, in plain language, the three uncertainties that matter most to your business right now. Not ten. Three. If you cannot choose, that is a signal that you are avoiding trade-offs.
Then write down the two things you can do in the next four weeks that will reduce uncertainty, and the two things you can do that will reduce downside if you are wrong. This forces you to separate learning from hedging.
Next, choose one behaviour you will practise for the next month that improves your “how.” Pick one. Maybe it is saying “I do not know yet” without apologising.
Maybe it is pausing before you respond to bad news.
Maybe it is asking for dissent early.
Maybe it is stopping yourself from changing priorities mid-week.
One behaviour. Small enough to notice.
Then tell your team what you are practising. It feels awkward. Do it anyway. It gives permission for others to adjust, and it creates accountability without drama.
Finally, set a rhythm: not endless meetings, but a predictable cadence where decisions get made, learning gets shared, and priorities get refreshed.
People can tolerate uncertainty when the process is steady. Humans like rhythm. It is primal. It is also organisational design.
The Point Nobody Wants to Hear
Uncertainty is not a temporary inconvenience. It is a condition of modern leadership. Some periods are calmer than others, sure. But the idea that we will return to a stable normal, where plans behave, and forecasts hold, is a kind of nostalgia. It is also a trap.
Senior leaders who thrive in this environment do not have a secret gift for prediction. They have a different relationship with control. They know what they can influence, they act decisively inside that space, and they do not waste energy pretending they can command the rest.
They also understand something that is oddly liberating: in uncertainty, you do not get to choose outcomes with precision. But you do get to choose who you are while you pursue them.
That choice is not philosophical. It is practical. It shapes whether people tell you the truth. It shapes whether teams move or freeze. It shapes whether your organisation becomes brittle or adaptive. It shapes whether you look back on a hard year and feel quietly proud of how you led, even if some numbers disappointed.
Because when the “what” is unstable, the “how” becomes your real legacy.
And if you are honest, it is probably the thing your people will remember anyway.
When You’re Ready to Do the Real Work
If this piece felt uncomfortably familiar, then this isn’t just theory for you.
Most senior leaders don’t struggle with strategy. You know how to build plans and drive performance. The real tension shows up under pressure — when decisions feel heavier, complexity clouds clarity, and you’re holding more than you admit.
I spent 30 years in global leadership roles at Linde, Johnson Matthey and 3M. I learned that you cannot solve non-linear problems with linear thinking. The leaders who truly hold under pressure don’t just refine technique — they transform how they operate internally.
Today, I coach senior leaders to build leadership that holds — strengthening trust, decision clarity and delivery that scales through others.
Through my books, Simplicity Switch (the outer game of process and execution), Leaders Crucible (the inner game of identity and presence) and Rhizome Organisation (the bigger system and the emerging organisation model), I help leaders move from reactive control to grounded, regenerative leadership.
If you’re ready to lead with clarity in complex times, book a Free discovery session here: Book A Call
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