The real risk of sustained uncertainty isn’t failure, but strategic drift
Writing: Nik Kinley
We all know the line: “culture eats strategy for breakfast.” But sustained uncertainty will eat them both before breakfast even begins. For all the discussion of the various challenges that today’s uncertainty poses to businesses, one of the biggest dangers sometimes goes unnoticed. Persistent uncertainty is quietly supercharging a silent performance-killer found in every firm: drift. Leaders need a new approach to managing it.
Drift is the gradual decay of strategy and performance caused by small slippages, misalignments and mistakes. It’s what tends to happen when activity isn’t tightly controlled by targets, plans and processes. Even if those are in place, there’s almost always a little drift in every business. Decisions can be delayed, priorities diverge, and standards soften.
In high-performing businesses, drift is kept in check. But the sustained nature of today’s uncertainty is radically altering the balance of things, as it is simultaneously strengthening drift while also reducing firms’ ability to contain it. And for the past six years, in a series of studies – some with Shlomo Ben-Hur – we’ve been studying how this happens and how to rectify it.
Supercharging drift
The reason uncertainty can increase organizational drift lies in the psychology of how it affects employees’ brains. It activates neural systems involved in threat, which changes how people process information: typically narrowing attention, reducing flexibility, and making them both more cautious and more likely to be distracted by immediate and salient issues. These are precisely the types of behaviors that can slow pace and create the minor slips and mistakes that lead to drift. The most common impact is decay in one of four things.
1. Focus Understanding what is important and what should be prioritized
2. Decision-making How and by whom decisions should be made
3. Coordination Collaboration within teams and across departments
4. Execution Operational standards, pace and productivity
Moreover, the past few years have witnessed a shift in the amount and type of uncertainty businesses are facing. Commercial environments that 5-10 years ago were characterized by episodes of volatility have now become more or less permanently, systemically, uncertain. This has not just mildly increased the potential for drift, but supercharged it.
In part, this is because there is simply more uncertainty around – meaning it has a greater impact on people and thereby leads to more drift. But it is also because the continual nature of today’s uncertainty means there are no periods of relative relief. This compounds the accumulation of drift. Mistakes build on mistakes without being rectified. As a result, drift has greater potential to develop more rapidly than ever before. And heightening this risk is the fact that uncertainty is not just supercharging the development of drift, but also significantly limiting organizations’ ability to counter it.
Undermining grip
High-performing firms have effective containment mechanisms that enable them to identify and course-correct drift. At the heart of these defenses are their leaders – the core structural mechanism through which every business organizes, monitors and steers activity. Sustained uncertainty, however, fundamentally undermines organizations’ defenses by reducing leaders’ ability to do these things.
One way uncertainty does this is by having the same direct effects on leaders’ brains as everyone else’s – activating the neural pathways linked to threat, with the same behavioral results. This can be damaging to organizations as it affects leaders’ decision-making.
But through our research, we’ve discovered three other indirect effects that uncertainty can have on leaders, which – though less visible – can be much more damaging to their ability to control drift. They occur because of how uncertainty changes the environment leaders work in.
1. Instinct Uncertainty increases cognitive load and reduces the relative time leaders have to process information. Consequently, it pushes them to rely more on instinctive ways of thinking and behaving that may not fit the challenges of the present moment. This might include their attitudes to risk, their preference for certain solutions, and their default approach to managing conflict. When tendencies like these become more internally driven, leaders are both less sensitive to signs of drift and less reliably able to correct it.
2. Power Uncertainty also amplifies people’s reactions to authority, which can distort information flows. It increases the degree to which people filter what they say to leaders, slows the passage of bad news and upward challenges, and increases leaders’ susceptibility to overconfidence. The consequences can be that leaders are blindsided by drift, make ill-informed decisions, and overdo their efforts to exert control.
3. Impact Finally, uncertainty also changes leaders’ environment by heightening followers’ sensitivity to their actions, especially negative ones. This amplifies leaders’ potential to harmfully impact behavior and culture – which both limits their ability to contain drift and increases the chances they may inadvertently accelerate it.
These effects often work in combination. Consider Paul, the CEO of a European manufacturing company we worked with. The business already struggled with drift, evident in slow decision-making, a lack of initiative, and a tendency for information and ideas not to flow upwards. Unfortunately, Paul’s style only made it worse.
His instinct was to move at pace, be decisive and sound confident. However, focused on high-level ideas, he often moved forward without providing details, creating lag as people tried to work out exactly what he wanted.
His directive, authoritative manner inadvertently exacerbated this. Even though he would have welcomed discussion, his style was interpreted as a signal to not raise issues or ask questions. People began to filter what they told him, too, which meant Paul lacked a reliable mechanism to help him understand what was happening below him.
Wary of making mistakes and displeasing their boss, people began watching Paul’s every word and deferring decisions to him. The pace of work slowed and bottlenecks formed. Paul could feel this and became frustrated with it, but his instinct to step in with decisive directions invariably just worsened the problem. As a result, drift accelerated and results slipped – and he could never quite pinpoint why.
Regaining grip
Making strategy stick has never been easy; drift has always been part of the challenge. But beefed up by sustained uncertainty, drift is growing muscles and attitude. As a result, the central leadership challenge in today’s organizations is evolving from being agile in the moment, to maintaining grip over time. The kicker is that uncertainty is quietly undermining leaders’ ability to contain drift and sustain strategic grip. What, then, can they do about it?
Recommendations for organizations
Because individual symptoms of drift can be easily overlooked and overall results can mask its presence, businesses tend to underestimate its spread and impact. The critical step that organizations need to take is to acknowledge drift as an issue and implement a plan to counter it. These obviously need to be tailored to organizational needs, but the most successful responses build on three foundations.
Relying on individuals to implement their own solutions under pressure is unreliable. Consequently, solutions should be organizationally driven and system-embedded, not leader-dependent.
The best responses combine three factors: support for key individuals to minimize uncertainty’s direct effects on their judgment; development input for leaders to mitigate the three traps created by uncertainty’s indirect effects; and system-wide monitoring of potential drift weak points.
With development input, focusing on different leadership traps tends to yield different types of grip improvement. For instance, targeting the instinct trap can improve the detection of drift signals. Countering the power trap can improve information flow and reduce decision drag. And addressing the impact trap can improve initiative and reduce cultural drag.
Recommendations for leaders
Through our research and coaching, we have developed the DISO model, to help leaders ensure they steer activity in a manner that contains drift. These activities are rarely sufficient alone, but are a common required foundation that almost all leaders need to maintain strategic grip.
D – Define a simple, shared understanding Uncertainty increases people’s cognitive load, cutting their capacity to think things through. The easiest way to reduce this load this is to create and communicate a few simple points of clarity that remind people what is important and what they need to focus on. It is as simple as saying, “What is important is A, B and C,” and then checking that everyone understands the priorities. Everyone can have individual targets, of course – but a shared objective, or a shared way of working, is essential. It binds people together and can balance the uncertainty.
I – Interrupt instincts In our research, leaders report on average that they spend 72% of their day running on autopilot, relying on instincts, without the time to properly think things through. It’s in these moments that leaders are most likely to make mistakes or fail to spot others’ small errors – when they are least aware and least in control of their impact. Leaders need to develop techniques to stop responding automatically and buy time to be more thoughtful and deliberate, even if only for a moment or two.
S – Strengthen their signal It is a basic law of power and authority that it kills the flow of information. Yet to identify where and how drift is occurring, you need to know what is happening in your business. Most leaders tend to overestimate their understanding of what’s happening, so it is vital to maintain persistent curiosity. Constantly asking questions is one simple way to do this and to encourage people to speak up. There is ample literature on topics, such as psychological safety to help here – just make sure that reality reaches you.
O – Clarify ownership Finally, make sure everyone is clear on who owns what decisions, when it is okay to escalate them, and when it is not. Do not enable, normalize or allow decision creep, where decisions continually get escalated upwards. Yes, this is sometimes necessary, but it should not be standard practice. This is both good empowerment, and key to avoiding a common form of decision drift.
Staying power
For years, the leadership mantra has been agility: pivot faster, adapt quicker, embrace change. But we’re beyond that now. The challenge today is staying power. Speed and adaptability will always be important, of course – but they’ve become the price of admission, rather than a source of competitive advantage. What separates high-performing organizations now is something less visible but far harder to build: the ability to identify and counter drift before it takes hold.
Sustained uncertainty isn’t just a strategic challenge. It quietly gets inside people’s heads, reshaping the cognitive landscape that employees and leaders have to navigate, triggering neurological responses that make people more prone to the small slips that let drift silently take root. Strategic durability will be the defining strategic strength of the decade. Countering drift is how it’s built.
Nik Kinley is a leadership assessor, consultant and coach, and author of The Power Trap: How Leadership Changes People, and What to Do About It (Palgrave Macmillan)
