Leading Through Uncertainty with Strategic Agility
- Darren Emery
- Jul 14
- 5 min read
How the Best Execs Lead When There Are No Right Answers
“In a complex space, there are no repeating relationships between cause and effect. That’s why you can’t solve complexity with best practice. You manage it by acting and sensing.” - Dave Snowden
You don’t need to be a philosopher to notice it: the world doesn’t come with instructions anymore. Not the kind that work, anyway. Whether you're a CIO staring at an underperforming transformation, or a COO trying to balance predictability with innovation, the old comfort blanket of "right answers" is threadbare. Strategy is now a live experiment, not a masterplan.
The best executives I’ve worked with don’t shy away from this. They don’t waste time pretending the future is knowable. Instead, they lead in ways that embrace uncertainty - through alignment, adaptation, and agility. And crucially, they stop trying to look smart and start helping others be effective.
When the Map Doesn’t Match the Terrain
In 2007, Dave Snowden introduced the Cynefin Framework, a sense-making tool for navigating different types of problems. If you’ve ever wondered why your delivery team keeps spinning wheels despite being full of smart people, Cynefin might help.
It splits the world into five domains:
Clear (best practices)
Complicated (good practices, experts required)
Complex (probe, sense, respond)
Chaotic (act to establish order)
Confused (default state of most boardrooms)
Enterprise delivery, especially at scale, doesn’t live in the neat and tidy domains. It’s usually in the complex one. In this space, there are no linear paths. No obvious answers. No playbooks that survive first contact with the customer. It’s not that your people are broken - it’s that your context is.
Yet many leaders reach for certainty - they demand a roadmap when what they really need is a compass.
Case Study: The Pivot That Didn’t Break Us
A few years ago, I worked with a financial services client in the middle of a digital overhaul. The programme was floundering: the teams were siloed, delivery was erratic, and leadership was fixated on hitting a quarterly roadmap that made sense only in hindsight. Strategy, as far as I could tell, was "finish the Gantt chart."
Then the game changed. A major regulatory shift came in with just 12 weeks' notice - an unexpected curveball that invalidated half the work in progress.
Panic was the default response. But one exec, the COO, did something quietly brilliant. She didn’t issue new marching orders or commission a fresh deck. Instead, she called the key product, tech, and compliance leads into a room and said: “We need to hit this date, but I’m not going to tell you how. Tell me what’s possible, and what trade-offs we can stomach. My job is to keep the politics out - yours is to make the call.”
The result? The teams didn’t just deliver on time - they improved flow, made better decisions, and built stronger cross-functional trust. It wasn’t perfect, but it worked - because the executive led with intent rather than control. She created clarity of purpose, not certainty of plan.
Intent > Instructions
This is where intent-based leadership comes in, a concept made popular by L. David Marquet, a former U.S. Navy captain who turned his submarine around (literally and metaphorically) by flipping the script: from command-and-control to clarity and competence.
The idea is simple but radical in large enterprises:
Leaders express intent, not orders
Teams own decisions, not just tasks
Trust is built by thinking together, not pushing harder
In knowledge work, alignment beats obedience. The job of a modern exec is less “telling people what to do” and more “ensuring they understand why we’re doing it.”
As Stephen Bungay says in The Art of Action:
“Clarity of intent and freedom of action must go together. Without freedom, intent is just a command. Without intent, freedom becomes chaos.”
In volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA) environments, your people can’t act like cogs in a machine. They need to behave like a network of intelligent sensors - responsive, adaptive, and aligned to a shared objective.
Why This Matters More Than Ever
According to a McKinsey study, 70% of digital transformations fail to meet their goals. Not because the teams are incompetent, but because the context for decision-making is broken. Strategy gets locked in slides, leadership overreaches into detail, and teams don’t know whether to ship, pivot or panic.
That’s why strategic agility is a capability, not a methodology. It’s how quickly your organisation can sense change, make aligned decisions, and adjust course—without waiting for the next quarterly steering committee.
The irony? Many execs try to manufacture control through over-planning, when what’s needed is confidence through clarity.
Here’s how the best execs do it:
1. They know what kind of problem they’re facing
Cynefin isn’t just a cute model—it’s a GPS for executive judgement. If you mistake a complex domain for a clear one, you’ll apply best practices to a space that requires experimentation. That’s a fast track to failure.
2. They lead with intent, not instructions
Clear strategic outcomes, not rigid deliverables. Trust your teams to fill in the “how” once the “why” is solid. Guardrails over guard towers.
3. They build feedback loops that matter
No more dashboards that tell you nothing. The best leaders shorten the loop between decision and data, so adjustments happen in real time, not in hindsight.
4. They create space for dissent and discovery
The right answer may not exist - but better answers usually do. Diverse perspectives are your hedge against blind spots.
5. They absorb ambiguity so others can act
Executives are emotional shock absorbers. They create psychological safety not by having answers, but by holding space while others figure them out.
Let Go to Lead
Here’s the hard bit. Many leaders rose through systems that rewarded certainty, delivery at all costs, and saying “yes” to everything. Letting go of control feels like dereliction. But in a world of complex, interconnected systems - letting go is often the most responsible thing you can do.
If your delivery teams seem stuck, don’t assume incompetence. Check whether your leadership model matches your environment. You may be solving complexity with a hammer.
The best execs don’t lead by directing traffic. They lead by setting intent, creating clarity, and empowering teams to navigate the fog.
That’s not soft. That’s hard-nosed, high-leverage leadership in a world where no one has the manual.
