ISSUE #029 | THE LEADERSHIP CONTRARIAN
A quick note before we begin. Two weeks ago, I told you Uncertainty was the next in the VUCA series. Here it is - Enjoy! [Read the first issue in the VUCA series here]
Uncertainty isn't new. You've lived with it your whole life
Will it rain tomorrow? Will the check come today? Will traffic make you late? That's uncertainty. It's background noise. You've built enough instinct around it that it barely registers.
That's not what's coming for your business.
What's coming - what's already here - is a different animal entirely. VUCA-level uncertainty used to show up as a spike: a recession, a shock, 6 to 18 months, give or take, then back to normal. From past experience, you had a rough idea how long it would last, and you were confident it would end.
For the last 10 to 15 years, it hasn't ended.
Most leaders think we're still waiting for things to settle back down. The real problem is that "settled" isn't coming back. This level of uncertainty is the new norm. And every quarter you spend waiting for it costs you ground you won't get back.
Here's what I mean
Picture running through your own house in broad daylight from the living room, into the kitchen - you've made that trip ten thousand times. You don't think about it. You don't even look down.
Now do it at midnight, during a power outage, with the lights out cold.
You slow down immediately. Not because the house changed, because your ability to see it did. You're feeling your way past furniture you know by heart, and you're still moving cautiously, because being wrong once means a banged-up shin or worse.
Now add one more detail. While the lights were out, somebody rearranged the furniture - and you had no idea.
You take three steps in, moving the way you always have, and your shin smacks into the coffee table sitting in the wrong place. For a second you're stunned. Then the pain hits, sharp and excruciating. Then you're mad! Then confused: what the heck is that doing there?
You take a beat, you gain some composure, and then you feel your way around and realize nothing is where you left it. Your mental map, the one you've trusted for years, doesn't work anymore. And it's not obvious yet what the new one should look like.
You still have to get to the kitchen. But you're not running there anymore.
That's VUCA-level uncertainty. And it doesn't stay in the living room. It shows up in your business the exact same way. It's not that nothing works; it's just that some of what you trusted still works, and some doesn't, and you're not always sure which is which.
This shows up in ways you can point to
Your pipeline gets thinner, even though the outreach didn't change. A friend of mine who has been in business for thirty years told me recently that his pipeline has never been this lean.
Deals that used to close in three weeks now stretch to three months, because your buyer is just as uncertain as you are. Cash flow gets harder to trust, so the twelve-week forecast you used to build with confidence becomes a guess with a spreadsheet attached to it.
That's not abstract, and it's not just you. A small chocolate-shop owner put it plainly this month: her whole planning method right now is "a wing and a prayer." That's the actual phrase she used. And she's not alone: more than seven out of ten small business owners say the constant back-and-forth on trade and pricing has made it difficult to plan.
The old solutions still work - sometimes. That's almost worse than if they'd stopped working altogether, because now you can't tell in advance which decision is going to work and which one is going to cost you. You're leading in the dark, and the furniture hasn't stopped moving.
And here's where it gets worse.
When you can't stand not knowing, you tend to reach for one of two things, and both of them cost you.
The first is making a decision just to make the discomfort stop. Not because it's the right call, but because at least it's a call. You grab whatever's in front of you, tell yourself "well, at least I decided," and move on without really knowing if it was the right move or just the fastest one.
The second is locking everything down. One small business owner stockpiled a full year of inventory because he was afraid of the next price shock coming out of nowhere. That instinct makes sense, but dumping your cash into inventory now means you don't have it later, when you actually have better information and a real opportunity shows up. You buy yourself protection today and pay for it in flexibility tomorrow.
There's a third option, and it's the harder one: sit in the discomfort a little longer.
Silence is Not Golden
You don't have enough information to be certain about anything right now or enough to have real confidence in how all the different factors are going to shake out. That's not going to change by waiting. You have to learn to work with what you have.
Here's something else worth saying out loud: most leaders don't have all the answers right now - and neither does anyone else. But there's a real difference between being honest about what you don't know and going silent because you're afraid to sound uncertain.
Your people can already tell something's off. They see it in their personal budgets. Their grocery bills, their gas bills and every other thing they have to pay for. And they know it’s affecting the company also. Silence doesn't protect them from that. It just tells them you don't trust them enough to be vulnerable with them. And that makes them nervous and contributes to them having less confidence in their own jobs. And you can imagine what that does to both their productivity and their decision-making ability.
You've probably had an employee or a partner insist that nothing's wrong when you could tell, without a doubt, that something was off. I often hear the old Shakespeare line in my head: "The lady doth protest too much, methinks." Your team notices the same thing in you.
So what do you do? You build leadership and decision-making capacity by growing your ability to operate with less information and less certainty. Same as if the lights in your living room never came back on, you'd learn to adjust. You'd learn the room again, but with the new limitations. This is no different.
Developing your capacity starts with naming exactly what you're dealing with. "Everyday uncertainty" and "VUCA uncertainty" are not the same problem, and treating them the same just means doing more of what already isn't working. Name which one you're actually facing, and you make faster, clearer decisions, because confusion drains more energy than the uncertainty itself does.
It also means holding your old playbook a little looser. The instincts that built your business are good instincts. They were built for a world you could see more clearly, and you spent years internalizing the lessons you learned. Some of them still apply; some of them need updating for a world and an economy where the "furniture doesn't stay put," if you know what I mean.
And it means investing in what it actually takes to make wise decisions with less certainty than you're used to. Waiting until you feel confident before you decide is no longer a strategy. It's a slow way to lose ground to the leaders who learned to move anyway.
Let's get concrete
Start here:
- Identify your gaps.
- Identify your strengths.
- Compare both against a real list of fundamental leadership competencies, tested by research and practice, not somebody's top-10 opinion list. (Want mine? Reply "yes, please" to this email and I'll send it your way - it's built from that same research, not just my personal take.)
- Use all three to remap the world you're actually operating in.
That's the starting point for retooling in a season like this one.
The most effective way isn't random. It's not grabbing whatever leadership book looks good at the bookstore this month. It's going back to the fundamentals with a systematic approach, ideally with a mentor, guide, or coach walking you through it.
There are plenty of good leadership and business coaches out there. There are a lot more who say they can help but won't bring you a holistic approach, and don't actually have real business or leadership experience, or experience developing other leaders. If you'd like some help along these lines, we'd be glad to talk with you about whether what we offer would be useful.
Your business doesn't need the lights back on to keep moving. It needs a leader who's built the capacity to move without them.
What would change for you if you stopped waiting for certainty and started building your capacity to lead without it?
If this was helpful to you, email me and let me know.
Until next time,
Keep learning.
Keep growing.
And God bless,
Michael
