How to lead when nobody knows what’s coming

The case for calm in a world on fire.

[Source Image: Adobe Stock]

“If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you, yours is the world, and everything that’s in it.” —Rudyard Kipling

“If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you, yours is the world, and everything that’s in it.”

Right now, CEOs are confronting a grim reality. The global trade system that has underpinned business planning is unravelling. Ships pile up in harbor, supply chains that have taken years to build are being undermined, and the diplomatic relations that hold world trade together are fraying.

The most destabilizing feature of our current situation is the uncertainty it breeds about the future. If leaders could reliably predict the next catastrophe, at least they could plan and prepare for it. But right now, the ground rules of global commerce (and global politics, but that is a separate story) are being rewritten in real time, and nobody can say where the next chapter will lead us.

The natural human response to this kind of uncertainty is twofold. We try to reduce it and we try to control it. This kind of response is very understandable. There may even be an evolutionary element that makes it natural. However, it is also precisely the wrong mindset for businesses that want to thrive in the midst of this chaos.

Ready to thrive at the intersection of business, technology, and humanity?

Faisal Hoque’s books, podcast, and his companies give leaders the frameworks and platforms to align purpose, people, process, and tech—turning disruption into meaningful, lasting progress.

When the world becomes volatile and mysterious, we search desperately for information, for someone who can tell us what is coming. And while we’re doing that, we plan and plan and plan, as though by planning the future we can master it.

This behavior might look like diligent and responsible leadership. Yet the mindset that accompanies it is often anything but. The desire to do something . . . anything . . . to feel a sense of control over the situation comes from an absence of composure. It also often reflects an unrealistic view about the world. Sometimes, there is nothing we can do to turn disorder into order. A refusal to accept these very real limits can lead businesses into a variety of forms of self-harm.

The leader who can’t sit with not knowing will do almost anything to make the discomfort of uncertainty go away. They will commit to a plan not because it is the best option, but because having a plan feels better than having a question. And this then locks the organization prematurely into a position that will be hard to change. Options that were open are now closed off. Resources that could have been spread across multiple bets are concentrated in one place.

The leaders who navigate chaos effectively do something rather different. Instead of seeking certainty where there is none, they tolerate the discomfort. They stay in the space of not knowing without rushing to fill it. This is not a form of passivity and it is not indifference—it is the type of composure that is a precondition for surviving a world that is turned upside down anew each and every day.

Ryan Coogler on how he became a creative leader

© Fast Company