How good are you at leading when you genuinely have no idea what happens next? I mean, we all kinda need to be thinking about this! Can’t quite avoid the reality that every freaking thing is changing, a lot, all the time! It’s exciting and spooky, and I am jazzed about it one minute and needing another Yoga class to calm my nerves the next. I was recommended to read a recent release, Marianne Bachynski's Fit for Uncertainty. It reinforced for me that leading when nobody really knows what’s coming next is the new norm. And it’s all gonna be OK.
AI is changing jobs faster than companies can figure out what those jobs should become. Organizations are restructuring. People are learning new skills while still trying to do the work sitting in front of them, and strategies that looked brilliant twelve months ago are being pulled back out and looked at again. And there sits the leader. Everyone is still looking at you, asking the same question: so, what are we going to do?
Fit for Uncertainty: Lead with Purpose, Adapt to Change, and I got stuck on the title before I got very far into the book. Fit for Uncertainty. We spend our careers trying to become better leaders. We learn strategy, finance, operations, communication, how to build teams, read markets, and get results. Most of that training assumes there is an answer to find. What happens when there isn't one yet?
Maybe leadership today requires a different kind of fitness. The kind that is trained for uncertainty
The author's career spans decades of technology and transformation leadership in financial services, including senior roles at Morgan Stanley, Citi, and AIG. Put technology, money, regulation, risk, and constant change in the same room, and you get a pretty good laboratory for uncertainty.
Early in the book, she writes, "Change at speed and scale is ever intertwined with uncertainty."
For a long time, leadership was closely associated with knowing. Know your business, know your numbers, know your market, have an answer. Experience rewarded us for it. Then the world sped up. Now you can know your business inside and out on Monday and discover Tuesday morning that a competitor moved, the customer changed their mind, or somebody released an AI tool that just rewrote part of your operating model. Knowing still matters. Knowing how to respond when you don't know may matter even more.
You can actually train for this.
This is what I like most about Marianne's premise. Being good at uncertainty does not require becoming the fearless executive who walks through chaos with all the answers, while everyone else loses their mind.
She builds the book around six principles: strategic leadership, an adaptive mindset, humility and empowerment, accountability and focus, effective communication, and cultural transformation. Below are some suggestions from what I’ve learned from this book, my career, and life.
Can you change the plan without losing the plot?
Leaders love plans. I love plans. Plans have dates, owners, budgets, milestones, and checkboxes, and they make me feel like I have my arms around things. Then reality wanders in and ignores the entire spreadsheet.
Strategic leadership means separating where we are going from exactly how we thought we'd get there, because those aren’t always synonymous. The plan may change, and your people still need to understand the purpose, and the more the plan changes, the more important that purpose becomes. People are far more capable of adapting than we sometimes give them credit for when they understand what they are solving for and why it matters. Your job is to keep that part visible.
How good are you at changing your mind?
Experience allows us pattern recognition. We have seen things go wrong before; we know where the bodies are buried, and we can often see around corners that someone earlier in their career cannot. So, yes, this ability is valuable. It can also allow us to assume this problem will behave like the last one. These days, that is a bigger no-no than a few years ago.
An adaptive mindset needs curiosity. What changed? What does someone closer to this know that I don't? Marianne writes about curiosity as one of the characteristics she values most in people, and I understand this, because you cannot adapt very well while defending everything you already believe. Stretch that mind.
Can you say "I don't know" without feeling like you gave up your value?
This might be my favorite test. Somewhere along the way, leadership and having the answer got tangled together. You get promoted because you know things and then you get promoted again because you know more things. Eventually you are sitting at the big table, and everyone assumes you know a whole bunch of things, and that can make "I don't know" surprisingly hard to say - for some people.
Sometimes it is the most useful sentence in the room. I don't know yet. What are you seeing? Who understands this better than I do? Those questions don't make a leader smaller. They make the room smarter. No CEO, CIO, CHRO, or executive team will personally understand every technological, competitive, and cultural shift hitting their company right now, and they shouldn't have to. The question is whether they have built an organization where the person who does understand it can speak.
Can you figure out what matters today?
Uncertainty has a strange side effect. It makes everybody busy. Meetings, initiatives, committees, new tools, another AI pilot, another "quick" meeting that somehow needs nine people. Suddenly everything is urgent.
Marianne pairs accountability with focus, and those two belong together. A leader has to keep asking what matters most right now, then make sure everyone knows who owns it. Tomorrow's answer might be different. Fine. Today, people need to know where to put their energy.
Can you communicate when the answer is still half-baked?
This is where leaders can get themselves into trouble. They wait. They want the plan finished, the announcement polished, the FAQs written, and the executive team aligned before saying anything. Meanwhile, everyone else is wondering what the heck is going on, and human beings are remarkably good at filling silence with their own explanations. Usually those explanations aren't comforting.
Communicating through uncertainty means being willing to say here is what we know, here is what we don't know, here is what we are figuring out, and here is when you will hear from us again. You cannot manufacture certainty. You can be clear. When people are already uneasy, clarity goes a long way.
Can your culture take a hit and keep moving?
This is where the book really comes together for me. A company cannot suddenly decide to have an adaptable culture the morning something goes sideways. You built it long before that morning. You built it when someone challenged an idea and wasn't punished for it, when a leader admitted they got something wrong, when information moved across departments instead of stopping at the border, when the person without the impressive title had the best idea, and somebody listened, and when asking for help was considered smart instead of weak. Those moments seem small when they happen. Then uncertainty arrives, and suddenly they aren't small at all.
So, are you fit for uncertainty?
I keep coming back to Marianne's title. You don't get fit by reading about exercise. Believe me, I have tried. You practice, you stretch, you do uncomfortable things, you recover, and you do them again. Eventually something that once knocked the wind out of you becomes something you know how to handle.
I think leadership works the same way. We can practice changing our minds, asking better questions, letting other people have the answer, communicating before everything is wrapped up with a bow, and focusing when everything around us is screaming for attention. We can build organizations that know how to move even when the road ahead isn't particularly clear.
I don't see the world becoming more predictable anytime soon, and AI certainly isn't slowing down to give us time to catch up. So the question I took from Marianne's book feels like an important one.
Are you waiting for things to become more certain, or are you getting better at leading when they aren't?
I’ll stop on that dramatic line.
Marianne Bachynski's Fit for Uncertainty: Lead with Purpose, Adapt to Change was published by Entrepreneur Books in March 2026.
Order Fit for Uncertainty on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=Fit+for+Uncertainty+Marianne+Bachynski
Learn more about Marianne and the book: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Fit-for-Uncertainty/Marianne-Bachynski/9798897010080
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