One of the things I've felt myself, and heard often from peers running large organizations, is how much pressure there is to be right.
It makes sense. Boards reward being right. Careers are built on it. So when things get uncertain, the natural instinct is to wait for clarity, build more consensus, run one more analysis, hedge a little. None of that is wrong, but in my experience it has rarely been enough on its own.
Because clarity, in the kind of markets we are operating in now, doesn't really arrive. And while we wait, someone with less to lose is usually already a few cycles into learning.
Something that's become clearer to me, after watching this play out in my own decisions and in the choices of leaders around me, is that the leader's real job in uncertain times isn't to be right. It is to learn faster than the market changes.
That sounds like a small shift, but in practice it feels like a different stance entirely. Optimizing for learning, for me, has meant acting before feeling fully ready, placing bets that are hard to completely justify in a board deck, and being okay with looking uncertain in front of people who expect you to have answers. It is harder than it looks. But it is the only stance that seems to actually compound when the ground keeps moving.
Three Moves
The quieter kind of leadership the era rewards.
01
Move No. 01
Listen wider than your peers do.
A pattern I notice in many executive forums is how often decisions get made inside a small circle of other executives. The signals that matter are usually further out. With the customers who churned. With the practitioners doing the actual work. With the competitor's ex-employee who will be candid over coffee. There is recent research from Macquarie Business School that found CEOs facing radical innovation decisions tend to defer heavily to their CTOs over their CMOs, which means the customer voice often arrives last. Apple's Vision Pro launch is a useful reminder of what that can cost. The leaders who seem to navigate uncertainty well are simply listening to a wider set of people than their peers are.
02
Move No. 02
Bet smaller than your ambition.
Big, dramatic bets in foggy conditions, in my experience, tend to be gambles wearing strategy clothing. The discipline that's worked for me is to incubate quietly rather than announce loudly. Run the experiment that costs you a quarter rather than the transformation program that costs you a year. Jeff Bezos's "two-way door" idea captures it well. If a decision is reversible, move fast. If it isn't, slow down. I've caught myself, and watched peers, get this exactly backwards. Slowing down on the reversible bets and rushing the irreversible ones, because the irreversible ones tend to look more strategic in the moment.
03
Move No. 03
Move earlier than the consensus.
By the time a path is well-lit, the advantage is mostly gone. The window for real returns, from what I've seen, is usually the window where the move feels slightly uncomfortable to defend. If a strategy is easy to justify to everyone, it is probably already priced in.
The thread running through these, for me, is this. Disruption isn't a bold leap. It is a series of intentional small steps in a direction others haven't looked yet, taken by leaders who have made some peace with being wrong sometimes, because they know being slow is usually worse.
The leaders I watch building durable enterprises don't have better forecasts than their peers. They have shorter feedback loops. They incubate when others announce. They move when others are still meeting.
They have quietly stopped optimizing for being right, and started optimizing for learning.
In a market where the next reset is always closer than you think, that's the only optimization I see actually compound.