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By Jim Stavis
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Uncertainty is no longer a temporary condition that organizations can endure until circumstances stabilize. Technological disruption, geopolitical tension, and changing customer expectations are unfolding simultaneously.
Across nearly four decades of building and leading businesses, I have repeatedly seen uncertainty become a reason to delay difficult decisions. I believe that response presents a greater danger than uncertainty itself.
The pressure is measurable. PwC’s 2026 Global CEO Survey found that only 30 percent of chief executives were confident about revenue growth over the following 12 months, down from 38 percent in 2025. Meanwhile, the World Economic Forum said in its report The Future of Jobs Report 2025 that employers expect 39 percent of workers’ core skills to change by 2030.
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Those findings should not lead businesses to pursue change indiscriminately. They should encourage leaders to develop a more disciplined way of acting before every variable becomes clear. Waiting for certainty can appear prudent, but it often allows customer needs to move, competitors to adapt, and internal capabilities to become outdated.
I first learned this in business. Over 16 years, I helped build an automotive-aftermarket operation from a garage into a manufacturing business. When a fire destroyed one of our facilities near Los Angeles International Airport, we could not wait for every answer before responding. We had to rebuild operations while protecting employees and providing direction through the disruption.
I faced another test when a business partner died unexpectedly. The loss required responsibilities to be reorganized and operations stabilized while the work continued.
Years later, after diabetes complications led me to consider a heart, kidney, and pancreas transplant, I again had to assess the available information and make a consequential decision without a guaranteed outcome.
Businesses Should Regularly Test the Assumptions Underpinning Their Strategies
The same principle has guided me in business. A responsible decision does not require perfect confidence. It requires enough reliable information to understand the available choices, their likely consequences, and what would justify changing course.
This distinction matters because leaders often confuse decisiveness with recklessness. Acting under uncertainty should not mean overlooking evidence or committing the entire organization to an untested idea.
It can mean running a limited pilot, establishing a budget ceiling, or testing a service with a defined group of customers. Smaller, reversible decisions allow organizations to learn without placing the whole enterprise at risk.
I saw this principle in a steel service business I co-founded in 1988 with four employees. We responded to buyer frustrations by allowing customers to order exact quantities, schedule delivery when needed, and request material cut to size.
When competitors began offering similar flexibility, we expanded into fabrication. The decision was not a dramatic reinvention. It was a measured response to evidence that the market had changed.
Adaptability also depends on listening beyond the executive suite. Customers and employees often encounter emerging problems before those problems appear in a formal report. Regular feedback can help leaders identify changing needs and test possible responses. The goal is not to follow every suggestion, but to prevent an established practice from continuing simply because it is familiar.
Organizations that build this capacity can respond to disruption without lurching from one initiative to another. They can test possibilities, measure results, and stop projects that fail to meet predetermined standards. Employees also receive a clearer message: change is not an emergency imposed without warning, but a process the organization knows how to evaluate.
Every leadership team should conduct a quarterly uncertainty review. The review should identify the three assumptions most critical to the organization’s current strategy, specify what evidence would show that each assumption is weakening, and assign one limited experiment to test the most consequential risk.
Each experiment should include an owner, a deadline, a spending limit, and measurable criteria for expanding, revising, or ending it.
A quarterly review would turn adaptability into a routine management practice rather than a reaction to crisis. It would also make accountability clearer by requiring leaders to document what they expect, what they are prepared to risk, and which results would justify a change in direction.
Leaders will not always know whether a decision is correct when they make it. Their responsibility is to ensure that uncertainty has been examined carefully, the risks are understood, and the organization remains capable of correcting its course. Responsible leadership begins with that willingness to decide.
Jim Stavis is an entrepreneur, author, and speaker whose perspective on leadership has been shaped by decades of business experience and significant personal adversity. The views expressed in this article are the author's own.
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