How to lead when the conditions for success suddenly disappear
Introduction
In the 21st-century business landscape, uncertainty has evolved from being an episodic challenge to a persistent condition of organisational life. Global supply chain disruptions, geopolitical instability, inflationary pressure, digital transformation, and the accelerating influence of generative AI have redefined what leadership resilience truly means. According to McKinsey & Company (2024), over 70% of executives report that their organisations face more volatility today than at any other point in the past decade. Yet, only one in four leaders feels confident that their teams are equipped to navigate it effectively.
Leading when the traditional conditions for success vanish requires a new playbook, one grounded in adaptive leadership, organisational resilience, and agile strategy execution. The most effective leaders do not merely react to disruption; they reframe uncertainty as a design principle, embedding flexibility, clarity, and trust into their systems, structures, and cultures.
1. The New Reality of Uncertainty
Across industries, leaders are facing “dynamic disequilibrium; a term coined by McKinsey Global Institute (2023) to describe operating environments where strategic stability is fleeting. The rapid adoption of AI, economic realignment, and shifting investor expectations have forced leaders to make high-stakes decisions with incomplete information.
The World Economic Forum’s 2024 Global Risks Report echoes this sentiment, citing “institutional fragility” and “technological volatility” as twin risks for global enterprises. In such a context, leadership success depends not on maintaining control, but on mastering adaptive capacity, the ability to sense change early, pivot decisively, and maintain coherence amid flux.
This shift reframes leadership from command-and-control to sense-and-respond. As Harvard’s Ron Heifetz notes, adaptive leadership is not about having the right answers, but about framing the right questions and mobilising people to tackle reality-based challenges collaboratively.
2. Rebuilding Political Capital: Leadership Through Coalitions
When the conditions for success disappear, budgets are cut, sponsors leave, or regulations shift, many leaders fall into a trap of solitary problem-solving. McKinsey’s research on “sponsorship capital” (2022) demonstrates that leaders with diversified sponsorship networks are twice as likely to sustain initiatives during organisational change than those dependent on a single champion.
Building coalitions, not hierarchies, becomes critical. Leaders must create what John Kotter calls a “dual operating system,” maintaining the formal organisational structure while nurturing informal networks that enable agility and speed. In McKinsey’s case, the collapse of the traditional support structure forced the firm to build a coalition of influence:
- Finance for financial credibility,
- Operations for executional grounding, and
- Sales for customer alignment.
This approach not only stabilised their initiative, but also distributed accountability across multiple champions. They effectively turned dependency into interdependence, a hallmark of resilient leadership.
McKinsey’s best practices recommend three actionable steps for rebuilding political capital under pressure:
- Map your influence network: Identify who holds power, budget, and informal authority.
- Diversify sponsorship: Avoid over-reliance on one leader or department; build cross-functional advocacy.
- Create rapid feedback loops: Use one-on-one check-ins and micro-briefings to sustain alignment and visibility.
3. Increasing Resiliency: Designing for Shock Absorption
Organisational resilience, as defined by the Boston Consulting Group (BCG, 2023), is the “capacity to absorb stress, recover critical functionality, and thrive in altered circumstances.” Resilience is both structural (systems and processes) and human (mindsets and values).
Resilient leaders build shock absorbers into their operations, strategic reserves of time, budget, and talent, to handle disruption without losing momentum. The “Conditions Ledger” tool used by Maria exemplifies this principle: a simple yet powerful mechanism to reassess the operational environment and clarify new realities.
A complementary McKinsey tool, the Stop–Start–Scale Grid, offers a structured way to refocus effort and investment:
- Stop activities that no longer create value,
- Start initiatives aligned with the new conditions, and
- Scale what is already working.
This mirrors the Agile Management Framework used by leading tech and financial organisations, where continuous reprioritisation ensures relevance.
Resilience also demands psychological safety, a culture where teams feel safe to speak up, adapt, and innovate without fear of failure. Research by Amy Edmondson (Harvard Business School, 2019) found that teams with higher psychological safety outperform peers during crises, precisely because they experiment and adjust faster.
4. Resetting Expectations: The Discipline of Clarity
In periods of volatility, ambiguity often replaces clarity, leading to confusion, burnout, and disengagement. According to Gallup (2023), only 47% of employees strongly agree that they understand what’s expected of them, a statistic that directly correlates with lower productivity and morale.
Effective leaders practice expectation reset, a structured re-contracting process with their teams to reestablish what success looks like under new conditions. This includes revisiting:
- Goals: What outcomes still matter most?
- Roles: Who is accountable for what?
- Resources: What constraints must we acknowledge?
- Metrics: How will success now be measured?
McKinsey and Harvard Business Review suggest using structured decision frameworks such as Erik Larson’s “Checklist for Faster, Better Decisions” to align teams during uncertainty. When conducted collaboratively, these sessions convert frustration into focus and disengagement into ownership.
5. The Leadership Mindset for Uncertain Times
Across studies from McKinsey, Deloitte, and PwC, the most effective leaders in uncertain environments share three traits:
- Composure under ambiguity: They stay calm when data is incomplete and avoid premature conclusions.
- Empathetic communication: They over-communicate priorities, trade-offs, and rationales to maintain trust.
- Iterative learning: They view strategy as an experiment, testing, learning, and pivoting with evidence.
This aligns with McKinsey’s “resilient leadership loop,” which emphasises reflection, reprioritisation, and renewal as a continuous cycle rather than a crisis response.
6. From Reaction to Reinvention
The ultimate lesson from leaders like Maria is that disruption does not have to mean derailment. By reframing uncertainty as a design constraint, she transformed a stalled initiative into a strategic reset, streamlining focus, enhancing credibility, and earning renewed executive trust.
In McKinsey’s 2024 global leadership survey, organisations that adopted this adaptive resilience model grew 2.5 times faster during volatility than those that clung to static plans. The implication is clear: in a world of disappearing certainties, the capacity to pivot with purpose is the new competitive advantage.
Conclusion: Leadership that Endures
In a volatile and complex world, success no longer hinges on perfect foresight, but on the ability to learn, adapt, and lead through ambiguity. Leaders who rebuild political capital, hardwire resilience into their systems, and reset expectations regularly are better equipped to transform uncertainty into opportunity.
Dr Terence Muchengwa
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