The defining feature of life is continuous, unpredictable change. And most workplace practices for dealing with it today are obsolete. Adapting to the speed, ambiguity and complexity of change requires an ability to comprehend wanted or unwanted disruption as a random possibility rather than an inherent risk. For a leader, that means accepting uncertainty and turbulence as the normative condition around which strategy, culture and performance systems must be designed and shaped. Instead of asking “When will we return to a new normal?” as was done during the pandemic, expecting the abnormal to continue forces better questions – like “How can we build an enterprise that will endure and thrive in unstable, unpredictable, uncontrollable times?” This is a leader mindset requiring the competencies of curiosity, adaptability, tenacity and resilience.
Those who succeed in this version of normal are open to counterintuitive advice, willing to experiment and adapt. Instead of speeding up to match the relentless pace of growth, they deliberately decelerate their pace of sense making to allow greater bandwidth for sound judgment and smart choices. An insistence of continuous urgency leads organizations into chronic reactivity, even poorer decisions, cultural erosion and burnout. Slowing down the thought process can enable the needed slack for asking better questions, defining clearer priorities and initiating fewer crash-vulnerable projects. It can enable one to see the bigger picture, discern the consequential signals amidst all the noise and place more intelligent bets. It can expand the time needed to create moments to ask what’s not being said, what perspectives are we missing, what root causes did we ignore, or which metrics are masking these deeper problems.
Innovative businesses are built on deciphering and understanding the unknowns. Their success lies in becoming comfortable with not assuming they possess or must have all the answers. They embrace ambiguity – the fertile ground of insatiable curiosity. For leaders, this means steering the organization into inquiry mode instead of demanding certitude. Rather than thinking or pretending the strategy for needed transformation should be more predictable or assured than it really is, it means becoming more comfortable with risking. That stance reduces blaming and shaming performance shortfalls or growth stalls, shifts greater attention to nurturing disparate feedback loops and encourages innovation.
The human condition drives us to acquire rather than subtract. Our default assumption is that more is better than less and perfection is better than good enough. Faster and cheaper and lower risk is the holy grail. But the endless pursuit of higher revenue, bigger projects, larger investments and greater speed is also a recipe for greater uncertainty, fragility, disappointment and burnout. What is sufficient for now can provide stability, sanity and perspective. Leaders who are able to define the meaning of “enough” in the context of their strategic priorities and growth targets are more likely to nurture sustainable performance and reduce the churn of shifting expectations and stretch goals that too often demoralize and confuse their followers.
The leap to embrace artificial intelligence is an overarching example of this thinking. We are witnessing that realization in an increasingly confused workplace. Used carelessly, AI will erode the very capabilities that make you competitive. It should augment business intelligence, not replace it. Its purpose is to deliver information, not wisdom. It encourages cognitive offloading – people stop thinking as deeply as they did before because the machine appears to do this for them. While a business may be technologically sophisticated, it can be losing the very expertise it needs to respond to crises, create and compete. Human skills, like muscles, atrophy when not used. These include judgment under uncertainty, systems thinking, making ethical choices and interpretive reasoning. This competency enables the ability to view opportunities through the lens of a strategy, surface conflicts, negotiate and be accountable. Human agency matters. Some questions have black and white answers but many come in nuanced shades of grey. And some have no right answers. So, who in the chain of command is answerable when AI is wrong?
Businesses are social structures built on mutual understanding and shared purpose. An organization’s culture emerges from interactions which are both cooperative and combative. AI threatens this fabric in two ways. First, it displaces interactions that require people to work through their problems collaboratively. They diagnose failures, debate options and bargain the trade-offs. Machines can’t (yet) do those things. When a chatbot tells you what to do, it’s channeling, in some unknowable mix, the average opinion on the internet. When decisions come from opaque algorithms, traditional sources of expertise lose their credibility and employees struggle to understand how decisions are made or who is ultimately accountable. Substituting AI for human judgment runs the risk of being unable to course correct when things go astray. Allowing AI to crowd out human decision-making capabilities may make you technically advanced but competitively fragile.
Finding and adapting to “a new normal” is about loosening the illusion of control over a predictable future and adopting a readiness mindset that anticipates multiple possible futures. Versatility and tenacity must be recognized, encouraged and measured. Empathy, curiosity and connection must be nurtured as core strategic assets. Most performance breakdowns are, at root, relational: low engagement, lack of ownership, conflict avoidance and weak collaboration. The problem is less about how communication is deteriorating and more about trusting how decisions are made. Leaders who do understand this pay deliberate attention to how people feel and whether they can see meaning in their efforts.
Planning remains relevant but so too is flexibility and open-mindedness. In leadership terms, strategy must become a living, dynamic portfolio of intelligent bets based on assessing risk scenarios. Normal is no longer a destination; it’s a moving target that must be continuously monitored, renegotiated and course corrected. History is formed through the hard choices that people must make at specific moments in time. Machines can inform us about the norms; they cannot decide them. That’s worth remembering.