10 Strategies for leading in uncertain times

Apr. 28, 2025 - MIT Sloan Management Review

Unpredictability is the new normal — and leadership must adapt and navigate through the chaos. Navigating today’s level of volatility demands not just agility but a willingness to rethink how we lead, plan, and adapt.

Leading through chaos is about learning how to ride the storm — and helping our teams do the same. Consider 10 insights to rethink strategy, speed, and resilience:

1. Build resilience for surprises.

This resilience may take different forms — for example, ensuring flexibility to recover critical operations quickly (such as by investing in a diverse supply chain, such that inputs or suppliers can be switched quickly when tariffs are put in place); setting up buffers against potential shocks (such as by diversifying the product portfolio or building up amounts of cash); or creating a modular supply chain (such that the impact of shocks is contained).

2. Train teams to not freeze.

One common emotional response to uncertainty is freezing. Of the business leaders who participated in our research, 32% said they have felt paralyzed by uncertainty when it was time to act. Even more, 42%, said they have put off thinking about decisions because it is uncomfortable. … Treating decisions as experiments can make a difference.

3. Toss out the crystal ball — strengthen your change muscles instead.

Adaptive companies may seem like they are always two steps ahead, but the key is not the ability to predict which way the wind will blow but rather the ability to sense the prevailing winds and adapt quickly to ride with them.

4. Expect to be uncomfortable.

Acknowledge that as a leader, you get to live in uncomfortable places that are never going to get comfortable. Uncertainty about the future is one of those places, and you will be a better leader for admitting the limits of your knowledge — and the limits of risk management and probabilistic thinking.

5. Focus your team on medium-term goals.

Looking three months out can create a longer-term sense of stability for your people, but it’s a short enough time period that, even if things shift around you, you likely won’t have to change your mission. To better enlist your team in the co-creation of the future, try asking questions like “What new sources of profit can replace dwindling ones?” or “What can we do to break down silos within our team?"

6. Customize the calm.

During times of uncertainty, different employees want different kinds of support delivered in different ways. … Managers must prioritize two behaviors: individualized consideration and building trust. … By prioritizing employees’ individual needs and understanding their fears, managers can target and address the sources of their uncertainty in a volatile environment.

7. Communicate that you’re all in it together.

Send regular messages to employees that emphasize ‘we’ and ‘us.’ Employees pay more attention to certain messengers than others. … By using collective pronouns and language, leaders can help reinforce a sense of safety and moral support among workers.

8. Say something before the silence does.

In difficult times, employees need to know the company’s actual status as soon as is reasonably possible. If you’re not giving your employees regular updates, they’ll make up what they don’t know to fill the information vacuum. Leaders need not worry about overproducing or overediting what they say; the most important thing is to speak and write in an authentic voice — and do it promptly.

9. Cultivate sensemaking at all levels.

Sensemaking involves pulling together disparate views to create a plausible understanding of the complexity around us and then testing that understanding to refine it or, if necessary, abandon it and start over. … It is considered essential for innovation and crucial to the development of nimble teams and organizations.

10. Prioritize the crisis; ignore the noise.

 In a non-crisis environment, organizations have many so-called first-order decisions to make — which problems to solve, which markets to enter, which of hundreds of potential products to develop. These decisions are hard to make because they inevitably involve trade-offs, given the opportunity cost of not taking the alternate path. In our experience, leaders often delay these decisions or sometimes fail to make them at all. The result is that projects and activities proliferate, meaning nothing gets the focus and the resources it needs.

But in a crisis, the first-order decision is effectively made for you: The crisis tells you where you need to focus with a high degree of precision. Nothing else is as important as solving that immediate problem. The only thing to work out is how best to do that — that is, which activities will best accomplish that outcome. We can think of these as second-order decisions.

Read the full article here.