Strategies for Businesses to Thrive in Uncertainty

📢 Thinking Through Policy Uncertainty: A Strategic Imperative for Business Leaders In times of great geopolitical and policy uncertainty—like the one we are witnessing today—business leaders must sharpen their ability to distinguish the signal from the noise. With shifting alliances, evolving trade policies, economic fragmentation, and security risks shaping the global landscape, how should leaders consider what matters most? Here’s where to start: 🔹 Focus on Structural vs. Cyclical Change – Not all policy shifts have the same weight. Some are fundamental shifts in global power structures, while others are short-term political maneuvering. Leaders must ask: Is this a momentary disruption or a realignment that demands a strategic pivot? 🔹 Identify the Intent vs. the Impact – Governments make bold statements, but the real question is whether they have the political will, economic leverage, and regulatory mechanisms to implement those policies effectively. Bluster does not equal execution. Distinguish rhetoric from reality. 🔹 Look Beyond Borders – Policy changes in one country often trigger ripple effects across industries, supply chains, and markets. A new trade restriction, for example, doesn’t just affect exporters; it reverberates through global pricing, logistics, and investment strategies. 🔹 Scenario Planning, Not Guesswork – No leader has a crystal ball, but those who think through multiple contingencies will be best positioned for success. What happens if tariffs rise? If economic blocs realign? If new sanctions emerge? Having a strategy for different scenarios creates agility in uncertainty. 🔹 Follow the Money & Markets – Watch how capital moves. Global investors, multinational corporations, and financial markets often react before policies take full effect. If businesses are shifting supply chains or hedging investments, that’s a sign of where the real risks and opportunities lie. 🔹 Security, Stability & Strategic Foresight – Policy uncertainty isn’t just about commerce; it has deep implications for operational risk, cybersecurity, and corporate security strategies. Leaders must assess vulnerabilities beyond the balance sheet. The Bottom Line? In this era of uncertainty, success belongs to those who don’t just react but anticipate. Those who ask the right questions. Those who embrace complexity rather than fear it. The future isn’t predetermined—but strategic leaders shape how they navigate it. What’s your approach to policy uncertainty? Let’s discuss. 👇 #Geopolitics #BusinessStrategy #PolicyUncertainty #GlobalTrade #Leadership

TRIGGER ALERT - TERRIBLE PHOTO TO FOLLOW....... From COVID Recovery to Leadership Resilience: Lessons in Leading Through Disruption It’s hard to believe that just five years ago, I was lying on my bathroom floor in Jersey City, fighting a profound case of COVID-19. Feverish, hallucinating, unable to control my body functions — it was one of the most humbling experiences of my life. In my worst moments, I called out for my late mother — a deeply human instinct when we feel powerless. I was lucky. I recovered after several months, albeit with lasting spinal and neck injuries, from an accident that occurred after my first vaccination. But I’m here — alive — unlike too many friends and colleagues who tragically lost their lives. COVID’s impact was devastating, yet it also forced us to rethink how we lead and work. Disruption is no longer an exception — it’s the norm. As leaders, we must evolve. Here are five key lessons from that experience: ✅ Embrace Uncertainty Proactively The pandemic revealed that rigid plans are fragile. Shift to continuous scenario forecasting and build agile teams that can pivot swiftly when unexpected changes arise. ✅ Balance Employee Needs with Business Goals The pandemic proved that productivity isn’t tied to office presence. Prioritize performance outcomes, foster flexible work models, and design accountability structures based on milestones — not mandatory office attendance. ✅ Test Ideas Quickly Embrace a ‘test and learn’ mindset. Pilot new approaches in small, controlled ways, gather data, and iterate rapidly. Leaders who adapt quickly win. ✅ Make Confident Decisions with Limited Data Perfection isn’t possible in a crisis. Establish decision-making frameworks that allow you to act with purpose despite uncertainty — and refine strategies as insights evolve. ✅ Communicate with Clarity and Authenticity People trust transparent leaders who acknowledge uncertainty but offer stability. Back your words with consistent action. Disruption will come again — perhaps not in the form of a pandemic, but through economic shifts, technological upheaval, or social change. Leaders who thrive will embrace adaptability, build trust, and empower their teams to turn uncertainty into opportunity. What lessons did you take from the pandemic that have reshaped your leadership style? I’d love to hear your thoughts. #Leadership #Resilience #Adaptability #ExecutiveCoaching #HumanPerformance #LessonsFromCOVID

Spent this morning training 150+ leaders on how to enable and evaluate high uncertainty work inside their organization. The 3 themes that emerged: 1. Leading vs Lagging Indicators - Don't measure early stage innovation projects on ROI right away. Instead, look for leading indicators that could lead to ROI over time. What evidence do we have that customers have these jobs, pains and gains and are willing to pay? Score these early stage ideas on different criteria than your established, business as usual projects. 2. Speed to Decision - Decision making speed is getting faster, not slower. You don't have the luxury to review perfect evidence before making a decision. Too many factors in your environment can change in the process. 3. Holding Accountable vs Giving an Account - Early stage project teams need a different accountability structure. Give them space to show how they are identifying, prioritizing and reducing risk. Don't tell them what to do, but give them the support to apply critical thinking skills and give an account of how they are reducing risk. One of the quotes that stuck with me the most, was that you can increase your overall speed simply by no longer working on projects that are no longer viable. Do you have a process to score your early stage ideas?

I’ve built companies through 3 major recessions, including the Great Financial Crisis. I've seen the collapse of Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, and many others. If Trump doesn't change course, that is where we are headed... So, how should we react now that the US is reshaping the global economic order and triggering a self-inflicted recession?  The playbook for navigating the new tariff regime is straightforward. The fundamental characteristic of this new world is uncertainty. And Profitable Efficient Growth (PEG) is the proper antidote to uncertainty. Here's how executives can successfully navigate the next 9 months (broken out by MACRO, BUSINESS and MINDSET lessons): MACRO 1. Review your supply chain and understand component pieces and what exposure you have to various suppliers and customers. 2. Review your customer base by geography and understand your exposure, not just for tariffs but for retaliatory behavior impacted by country-specific animus. 3. Understand currency exposure and estimate impact of dollar-denominated contract erosion. BUSINESS 1. Improve the frequency of your forecasting and ensure you’re forecasting cash, expenses and revenue on at least a monthly basis. 2. Develop a clear POV on fixed vs variable costs and leverage non-FTE hiring for maximum flexibility in case things go poorly. 3. Review your messaging to illustrate why your product is essential in a downturn. Enable your Sales and CS teams with talking points so they can lean into price and budget when the objection arises. 4. Make growth investments but ensure they're tranched. Avoid more than 2x-ing any growth investment. Layer in 1.5x investments, monitor for performance, and then invest again. 5. Ensure you're not over-extended. Leaning too far into growth on the expectation that things will go up may create financial jeopardy later this year. MINDSET 1. Leverage healthy mindset practices to ensure you remain calm and clear including meditation, exercise, and visualization. 2. Understand: Every crisis is an opportunity for the confident and those willing to lead. 3. Pause and ask yourself the question, “How is this a huge opportunity for our business?”. Journal what comes to you from a focused session. 4. Project clarity and confidence to your team. Let them know your organization has intentionally been designed to weather storms like these. We just got out of the post-COVID tech recession. These lessons should be fresh in our minds but they bear repeating. The folks that lectured us that we should stop thinking about margins and profitability were premature. We all need to be smart, responsible and prudent. This doesn't mean fearful. And this doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to grow. But it does mean it’s not the time for foolishness. We need to understand our market and our exposure. We need to design our businesses for anti-fragility. Our bets need to be sized. And we need to find the opportunity in the chaos.

The most dangerous person in your organization might be the one who's most certain about the future. In an era of constant disruption, traditional leadership models fall short. Here's what I've learned about thriving in chaos: - Embrace Strategic Humility: Conventional wisdom says leaders should have all the answers. Reality? In fast-changing environments, acknowledging what you don't know is power. It creates space for collective intelligence to emerge. Start key meetings by explicitly stating uncertainties: "Here are three critical things we don't know yet about this market shift." - Reframe "Mistakes" as "Tuition": In chaos, if you're not making mistakes, you're not moving fast enough. The key is to make those mistakes valuable. Create a culture where teams openly share lessons from failures, focusing on insights gained rather than opportunities lost. This transforms setbacks into catalysts for growth and innovation. - Cultivate Anxious Optimism: Blend "we'll figure it out" confidence with the urgency of "if we don't, we're toast." This mindset drives creativity and prevents both complacency and panic. In planning sessions, always pair opportunity discussions with risk assessments: "What's the best possible outcome here? Now, what could cause us to miss it entirely?" - Lead with Questions, Not Answers: In uncertainty, the quality of our questions matters more than the firmness of our answers. Start strategic discussions with: "What question, if answered, would change everything about our approach?" This focuses team energy on the most impactful unknowns. -Build Capacity for Uncertainty: Your job isn't to provide certainty—it's to build an organization that thrives without it. Regularly rotate team members across projects or departments. This builds organizational flexibility and prevents silo thinking. The leaders who will succeed today and in the future aren't those with the best plans, but those who build teams capable of rapid adaptation and relentless learning.

In a world where stability feels comforting, your capacity to navigate uncertainty determines what's truly possible. According to McKinsey & Company's 2025 Adaptability Index, organizations with high change readiness outperform competitors by 52% in market share growth and demonstrate 47% faster recovery from market disruptions. Here are three ways to transform change resistance into strategic advantage: 👉 Create "future-back thinking" rituals. Regularly practicing visualization of desired future states before mapping backward reduces change anxiety by 64%. Design structured processes that normalize positive future imagination as a core organizational competency. 👉 Implement "change partnership" protocols. Pair stability-oriented team members with naturally adaptive colleagues to create balanced change navigation teams. These partnerships demonstrate 3.4x greater implementation success than traditional top-down change management. 👉 Practice "possibility mapping". Replace threat-response with opportunity identification when disruption emerges. Build adaptive capacity by immediately documenting three potential advantages for every perceived challenge in the change landscape. This works and neuroscience confirms it: constructive change engagement activates your brain's reward pathways rather than threat responses, enhancing creativity, reducing cortisol, and enabling higher-order problem-solving. Your organization's resilience isn't built on rigid planning—it emerges from a culture where change becomes the most reliable competitive advantage. Coaching can help; let's chat. Follow Joshua Miller #executivecoaching #change #mindset

Leading in uncertain times is a hot topic today in business as we face a compounding set of unknowns: tariffs, inflation, volatility in our financial markets, the ongoing climate crisis, supply chain disruptions, global conflicts, and the advent of AI to name just a few. Whether you are an operator, investor or board member, I wanted to share a few of my approaches to dealing with the reality we are facing, and I would love your thoughts in response: 1. First, for me, is to remain consistent and committed to our company values. At PSP Partners, we express ours as IDEALS--Integrity, Diversity, Excellence, Alignment, Leadership and Service. Your teams want to know that during uncertainty you will make hard decisions that are grounded in your core values. 2. Radical honesty is critical. Bringing your leadership team to a point of embracing the reality of the landscape that your organization is facing is an essential foundation to then figuring out the vulnerabilities. 3. Ensuring that your balance sheet is strong to weather the difficult periods as well as to have the opportunity to play offense is more essential than ever. 4. Regular scenario planning and pressure testing various outcomes is essential to manage and mitigate risk; it is all the more important right now. This is also known as “red teaming” and it’s a critical thing to do. 5. Being curious about your blind spots and institutional biases will help create an environment where you and your team can safely challenge assumptions. 6. Overcommunicating with your management team and to your company as a whole have never been more needed. Remember it takes about 7 times for a message to break through. Don’t be afraid to repeat it over and over. 7. Embracing the idea that challenges also create unique and unexpected opportunities is so important. During uncertainty the best companies create extraordinary opportunity and returns for the long term. 8. A strong, innovative and resilient culture is always foundational and especially essential to navigating the current challenges. The CEO and your leadership team have to set the example.  

In uncertain times in business, the typical reaction is to act defensively. But this is wrong. In 2010, Harvard Business Review did a year-long study analyzing corporate performance during 3 global recessions (1980-82, 1990-91, 2000-02). They grouped companies into 4 groups: - Prevention (defensive) - Promotion (offensive) - Pragmatic (both) - Progressive (optimized) The Prevention-focused businesses performed worse than all others during the recessions. Progressive-focused businesses outperformed Prevention-focused businesses by 16% on average. So how do we be more progressive in tough times? Use the 80/20 rule: focus 80% of your efforts on growth and efficiency initiatives and only 20% on what to cut. Consider how to: 1. Increase revenue 2. Improve supply chain 3. Clean up processes 4. Automate Not only do these impact you during the recession, but they have long-term impacts even after it.

Navigating Leadership in Turbulent Times- A few days ago, I had an interesting conversation with a friend about how Non Profits are facing this period of  unknowns and instability. For organizational leaders, the role we play in guiding our teams and ensuring the stability and resilience of our organizations has never been more critical. Here are a few things I learned about leading through uncertainty- 1. Focus with Intent We are constantly being hit with a barrage of incoherent tweets, rash decisions, and contradictory messaging that can feel overwhelming. Reacting to everything will leave us scattered, unfocused, and ineffective. Leaders must prioritize their organizational goals and focus on what they are best equipped to address. 🔑 Choose your battles wisely and resist the urge to 'play whack-a-mole' with every issue. Not every fight is yours to take on, and sometimes, the wisest move is not to fight at all. Focused leadership drives meaningful impact. 2. Embrace Collaboration - In this season of uncertainty, collaboration is not optional—it’s essential. Community and partnerships have always propelled movements forward. 🤝 Build a collaborative work culture, encouraging your team to cultivate strong relationships both internally and externally.  Collaboration builds trust, and allows people to build upon their strengths and leads to better decisions and outcomes.   3. Flexibility & Adaptability -"Be stubborn about your goals but flexible about how you achieve them." Strategy is not a fixed plan but an evolving path to reach a predetermined destination. Recognize when adjustments are needed and model adaptability for your team. 📣 Communicate openly with staff about changes and align around shared objectives, even if absolute agreement isn’t always possible. Pathways can emerge when teams are nimble and solutions-oriented. 4. Support Your Staff- Amid external crises, organizational trust often becomes strained. Now is the time to double down on creating a supportive environment for your team.  Focus on the short-term goals and the long-term mission when conflict arises. Look for areas of agreement to rally around. 💡 Consider what your organization can offer during this period, whether that’s flexible policies, open communication channels, or empathetic leadership. Teams perform best when they feel valued and supported. 5. Safeguard Your Organization - If your mission runs counter to the incoming administration’s policies, preparation is key. 📋 Run a risk assessment and review your policies/processes to ensure compliance and readiness. Develop clear protocols and maintain a strong relationship with your legal counsel.  A proactive approach will protect your organization from unnecessary risks. I can say from experience that leadership in turbulent times isn’t easy, but it’s also an incredible opportunity to model resilience, inspire focus, and foster collaboration.

𝗠𝗮𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗿𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗔𝗱𝗮𝗽𝘁𝗮𝗯𝗶𝗹𝗶𝘁𝘆 𝗶𝗻 𝗨𝗻𝗰𝗲𝗿𝘁𝗮𝗶𝗻 𝗧𝗶𝗺𝗲𝘀 📊 Are you wrestling with the business world changing faster than your strategies can keep up? Like many leaders, you're standing at the forefront of change. The price of hesitation is steep, with chances and risks that could really throw a wrench in your company's plans and your leadership standing. I call leaders who can stay confident and agile, First Adapters. ✅ Busting patterns is the key to enhancing your organization's ability to pivot swiftly — to see the field of play and quickly change in a favorable direction. Here's what you can focus on to anticipate and adapt: 📋 Boost Pattern Recognition: Train yourself and your team to quickly identify and respond to new trends, ensuring your strategies remain relevant. As a team name patterns inside and outside the organization. 📋 Seek a Robust Strategy: It's not always about the best strategy but the strategy that can weather uncertainty and come out stronger. This involves thorough scenario planning, mapping out various futures to stay ahead of market shifts. 📋 Cultivate Innovation: Championing innovation sets the tone for a dynamic organization where fresh ideas flourish and quickly adapted. 📋 Overcome Regret Aversion: Our brain’s tendency is to avoid regrets, but it can cause us to play it too safe, undermining our adaptive skillset. Recognize the playing small tendency and opt for embracing steps forward. Failure is not having achieved the outcome, yet. Embracing these adaptive strategies can breathe new life into your organization's quest for success amid the tides of change. Which of these moves are you considering? Share your approach in the comments! 👇 #innovation #management #personaldevelopment #strategy #leadership #executives