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How Do You Lead When the Path Isn’t Clear?
Liz Doyle Harmer
February 12, 2026
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This edition of The Executiv was written by Liz Doyle Harmer, PCC, CPCC, Founder of Ello Leadership and a Core Coach at Executiv.
A few months ago, I was coaching a senior leader working in an environment of relentless change.
Every week, there was a new decision from the top. Priorities shifted. Structures changed.
Messages were revised and sometimes reversed. His team was losing morale. He was feeling the strain of holding things together. And underneath it all was a quiet but persistent question:
How do I lead when I don’t actually know what’s coming next? He wasn’t inexperienced. He wasn’t resistant to change.
What he was facing was something else entirely. It was sustained unpredictability.
Sound familiar? We’ve been here before. March 2020. January 2025. Game 9 World Series watching our brilliant Blue Jays.
Each time, our capacity for dealing with change gets tested. And here’s the truth we don’t say out loud often enough:
Change isn’t going away. If anything, it’s becoming more frequent, more layered, and harder to make sense of in real time.
Move Over VUCA. Hello BANI.
We’ve spent years talking about leadership in a VUCA world — volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous.
But today’s conditions are better captured by what futurist Jamais Cascio describes as a BANI world:
Brittle – Systems that look strong until they suddenly snap
Anxious – A constant background hum of uncertainty
Nonlinear – Cause and effect no longer line up neatly
Incomprehensible – More information, less clarity
In a BANI world, the issue isn’t competence or commitment. It’s that leaders are bumping up against the limits of capacities that were built for a more predictable time.
How Do You Thrive in BANI?
1. Recognize That You Have to Lead Differently
The first shift is recognizing what kind of environment you’re actually in.
The Cynefin Framework helps make this distinction clear.
In predictable environments patterns repeat, cause and effect are knowable, and best practices apply.
In unpredictable (complex) environments:
The past no longer reliably informs the future
Cause and effect can only be understood in hindsight
There are no best practices — only experiments
Many leaders are still trying to lead complex systems as if they were predictable.
That mismatch creates overwhelm, reactivity, and decision fatigue — not because leaders are failing, but because they’re using the wrong operating logic.
2. Set a Direction, Not a Destination
In complexity, leadership isn’t about defining the destination. It’s about setting direction.
As Jennifer Garvey Berger teaches, the best you can responsibly do is:
Get clear on what matters now
Decide the next step you’re going to take
Stay open to learning as the path unfolds
You won’t be able to see the end of the road. And there will be twists and turns you can’t yet imagine.
That’s not poor leadership. That’s what leading in complexity actually looks like.
3. Shift From Answer-Giving to Sense-Making
This is where many leaders get stuck. In uncertain conditions, the instinct is to think harder, decide faster, and project confidence.
But in a BANI world, leadership becomes less about having the right answer and more about creating the conditions for new answers to emerge.
This means:
Slowing down when the impulse is to speed up
Naming uncertainty instead of covering it
Helping people interpret what’s happening together
4. Practice Deep Democracy
In unpredictable environments, no single leader can see the whole system.
This is where Deep Democracy, a core principle in ORSC, becomes essential. Where Democracy means the majority voice wins. Deep democracy means all voices matter.
Not because everyone is right but because information is distributed across the system and everyone has a perspective that’s helpful.
Simple practices help:
Rotate who speaks first
Have people write before talking
Look for patterns in the team’s responses
Pay attention to what topics you aren’t discussing and which voices you aren’t hearing from.
5. Build Resilience for the Moments That Matter
Unpredictability isn’t just a strategic challenge. It’s a nervous system challenge.
We are wired for pattern, predictability, and control. In a BANI world, leaders will get ungrounded, repeatedly. Even if you went for that morning run, expect to get ungrounded before noon.
Resilient leadership isn’t about staying calm all the time.
It’s about being able to recognize when you’re activated and regulate in real time. It’s about recovering faster when things knock you off centre.
The Core Capacity Going Forward
When everything feels uncertain, the most important leadership skill becomes this:
The ability to take an Observer View. The capacity to slow down, get still, and let go of what you thought you knew so you can truly sense what’s happening now.
That means giving up the grip on certainty, control and the perfect plan.
In a world without clear paths, awareness becomes the compass.
And leadership becomes less about predicting the future and more about meeting it with presence, courage, and the capacity to respond as it unfolds.
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QUOTE OF THE WEEK
“We do not have to become heroes overnight. Just a step at a time, meeting each thing that comes up, seeing it is not as dreadful as it appeared, discovering we have the strength to stare it down.”
Eleanor Roosevelt