How to Lead Through Uncertainty: A Case Study of a Scaling Company

Growth is usually seen as an unambiguously positive thing. It’s associated with new opportunities, resources, ambition, and prospects. Yet the stretch between where an organization is now and what it wants to become often turns out to be far harder than the appealing picture of the future suggests.

This is especially visible in companies that are trying to build the infrastructure for growth while already growing in the process.

This case came from David, the head of a company that recently entered a phase of active scaling. The organization has a clear direction, and its leadership makes decisions meant to help it grow — and yet the system itself doesn’t yet have all the structures, resources, and layers of management that usually support that kind of scale.

The case: when the plan keeps changing

The situation David describes is fairly typical of fast-growing companies.

He receives a new direction or task, spends a week or two developing a plan, documents the approach, brings in the right people, and starts organizing the work. Then new information appears: timelines shift, a new role becomes necessary, one initiative suddenly stops being a priority, and another takes its place.

In many cases the new decisions genuinely make sense — but the cost of each change during a period of transformation is extremely high. Every new direction means revisiting plans that are already in place, reallocating resources, re-explaining priorities to the team, and folding the changes into existing work that doesn’t simply disappear in the meantime.

The leader has a small team and no middle management to take on part of this work. So a large share of translating new decisions into concrete action ultimately falls on him.

Over time he began to notice that his own reaction to what was happening was changing too. When executives propose a new opportunity or ask, “What if we did X?”, his first internal response is increasingly, “With what resources, and on what timeline?”

He worries that he’s becoming more defensive, and that his questions about the team’s resources and capacity might come across as resistance, inflexibility, or even an inability to cope.

At the same time, he notices that the team probably sees him as less calm and confident than before. He used to be the one who helped people set priorities, protected the team’s focus, and created a sense of clear direction. Now he himself has to keep changing those priorities, revising his own decisions, and admitting that some things could have been set up differently.

And behind all of it lies a much more personal question:

The communication problem hiding behind the leadership problem

The core problem in this case isn’t a lack of resilience, patience, or leadership skill. The difficulty is that the leader keeps trying to create a stable reality for his team in a situation that is, right now, objectively unstable. And that distinction matters.

Leaders are often taught that one of their main jobs is to create clarity. And that’s true. But clarity and certainty are not the same thing, even though management communication very often conflates them.

If a leader believes that clarity means having the final answer before they can tell the team anything, then uncertainty starts to feel like a problem that has to be removed first.

But in a fast-changing environment, a final version of the plan may simply not exist. And that sets off a difficult loop. The leader tries to create certainty because he believes that’s what the team expects of him. But new information shifts the situation again, and before long he has to explain why yesterday’s plan no longer holds.

Every new change is experienced as a failure. The team feels the direction is constantly moving, and the leader feels even more pressure, because next time he needs to come up with a plan that will finally be stable enough.

At a certain point, the very attempt to keep creating stability becomes a source of enormous strain.

Don’t try to defeat uncertainty

My main recommendation in this situation was fairly simple: stop treating uncertainty as a temporary obstacle that has to be removed before the team can move forward.

In this organization, uncertainty has already become part of the work itself. The company is growing and, at the same time, trying to build the structures that growth requires. Priorities shift as new information appears. Decisions get revised because the organization is still learning to understand what it actually needs at the next stage.

Trying to create a completely stable reality for the team in these conditions may simply be impossible. It’s far more useful to build processes and communication so that people can work effectively even when not everything has been decided.

This doesn’t mean the leader should share every hypothesis, every doubt, or every possible scenario with the team. People still need priorities, boundaries, and a reasonably clear direction. But it’s important to learn to distinguish clearly between what is already known, what has been decided, and what is still changing.

Instead of talking to the team each time as if what’s in front of them were a final, unchanging plan, you can help them see what the situation looks like right now, which assumptions the current approach rests on, and what exactly might change it later.

For example, it can help the team to understand:

• What do we know right now?
• What is still uncertain?
• What information are we missing?
• Which parts of the plan are most likely to change?
• What stays important even if the details change?

This approach doesn’t remove uncertainty, but it changes people’s relationship to it.

Let the team help navigate

Another important aspect of this case has to do with the role the team plays in the process of change. David has a sense that he first has to absorb every new change on his own, make sense of it, find a solution, and only then present the team with a finished answer.

But a leader isn’t obliged to do all the intellectual and communicative work that uncertainty creates single-handedly. The team can also take part in making sense of what a new decision means. In other words, when a new priority appears, the conversation doesn’t have to be limited to the message: “This is what we’re doing now.”

Instead, you can discuss:

• What information do we need to move forward?
• What risks do you see?
• What will we have to stop or postpone?
• How will this change affect work already underway?
• What matters most to protect, even as the direction shifts?

This doesn’t mean the leader hands his decision-making responsibility over to the team. Rather, he stops being the only person who has to process all the uncertainty and turn it into a ready-made answer.

The people closest to the work can help spot risks, consequences, and constraints before a decision turns into another problem at the implementation stage. And that changes the very dynamic of communication.

Make the trade-offs visible

One of the most interesting parts of this case is the way David judges his own reaction to new initiatives. When yet another idea comes up, he automatically thinks, “And with what resources are we going to do this?” — and immediately starts to worry that it signals resistance or an inability to adapt.

I’d be in no hurry to draw that conclusion.

There’s a big difference between resisting every new idea and making the cost of carrying it out visible. Every new initiative has consequences. If the team starts doing something new, something else may have to be stopped, cut back, or postponed. If the timeline speeds up, the organization takes on additional risk. If a priority changes after the team has already invested significant time and resources in the previous work, that work doesn’t leave the system without a trace.

Making these trade-offs visible is not the same as complaining or refusing to change. On the contrary, it’s one of the important tasks of leadership communication, because you can’t make good decisions if their consequences stay invisible.

So the conversation can shift from “We can’t do this” to entirely different questions:

• If we start this initiative now, what are we willing to stop or postpone?
• If we speed up the timeline, which risks are we knowingly accepting?
• If this becomes the new priority, what happens to work that's already begun?
• Where will the extra resources come from?

Questions like these don’t shut the conversation down — they make it more realistic. And perhaps this is where the leader in this case might slightly rethink his own role.

Should a leader shield the team from uncertainty?

This case raises another important question: how much uncertainty should a leader take on themselves, and how much can the team see and live through alongside them?

There’s a fairly common belief that a good leader should create calm, stability, and confidence. But in an unstable environment, trying to fully shield people from any uncertainty can create a different problem.

The leader becomes the only person in the system who absorbs all the complexity and tries to process it into clear instructions. Everyone else gradually gets used to waiting for the moment when there’s enough certainty to start acting.

And then the organization becomes increasingly dependent on one person’s ability to always have answers that, in reality, may not exist yet.

This doesn’t mean, of course, that the team should simply be left in the chaos or told about every open question. Leadership still involves creating enough structure for people to work effectively. But there’s a difference between protecting the team from unnecessary chaos and trying to hide from them the very fact that the organization is currently in a process of change.

For some people, this kind of environment will turn out to be interesting and developmental. Others may realize over time that they prefer a more predictable organization with settled processes.

And that’s not a failure on anyone’s part. People simply have different relationships with uncertainty and different appetites for working in fast-changing systems.

Leadership isn’t a constant show of confidence

David was also concerned that the team might see him as less calm and composed than before. That’s an understandable worry, especially if his professional identity has been built largely around the ability to create clarity and a sense of control.

But I’d be very cautious about judging the quality of leadership purely by how calm a leader looks.

If information really is changing all the time, a feeling of uncertainty can be a perfectly adequate response to what’s happening. The fact that you’re not sure about everything doesn’t mean you’re leading badly. A different question matters far more: does the team understand what they can rely on?

Sometimes a leader doesn’t have to say, “I’ve got everything under control.” A different kind of communication can be far more useful: “We don’t have a final answer right now. Here’s what we know so far. Here’s what we’re still trying to figure out. And here’s how we’ll make the decision once new information comes in.”

This kind of communication doesn’t create certainty, but it does give orientation. And orientation is often what people miss most in situations where final certainty simply doesn’t exist.

What can stay stable when plans keep changing

When priorities, timelines, and structures are constantly in motion, it becomes especially important to work out what can, after all, stay relatively stable.

The plan itself may change, but the team can understand how decisions are made.

The direction may be revised, but people can know how and when they’ll be told about changes.

Resources may be limited, but the team can have a clear way to raise questions about risks and conflicting priorities.

It’s practices like these that become an anchor in a period of change.

Useful questions to ask yourself and your team:

• How do we make decisions when priorities conflict?
• How do we communicate changes?
• At what point do we raise concerns about risks or missing resources?
• What information should people get before the direction changes?
• Which principles stay important to us, even when the specific plan changes?

Over time, this can create something far more valuable than the illusion of stability — namely, trust in how the team moves through change.

The key shift in the leader’s role

For me, the core idea of this case is this: a leader doesn’t have to eliminate uncertainty first in order for the team to move forward.

Their task can be to help people understand how to move when uncertainty is already part of the situation.

Their task is to make assumptions visible, to distinguish what is already known from what is still changing, to show the trade-offs behind decisions, and to create a space where people can flag risks and consequences early.

Their task — and this is a crucial one — is not to measure their own leadership competence solely by how well they manage to hide their own uncertainty.

You can’t plan the whole route in advance, but you can understand well enough where you are now, where you’re trying to get to, and how you’ll find your bearings if new information changes the path again.

And perhaps this is one of the most important communication tasks of a leader in a period of transformation and rapid growth.

Leading through uncertainty isn't the ability to always know what comes next. It's the ability to help people keep moving when no one has the full answer yet.

A question to take with you

If you lead a team through rapid growth, transformation, or constant change, it may be worth asking yourself:

Sometimes the task of communication isn’t to make uncertainty smaller. Sometimes it’s to create enough clarity, trust, and shared understanding that people can keep moving through it together.

If this situation feels familiar

You may also notice that in times of change, the usual ways of managing and communicating stop working. There’s more uncertainty, priorities shift faster than processes can settle, and the constant need to adapt gradually starts to affect not only your decisions but also your relationships with your team, colleagues, and leadership.

Sometimes the problem in these situations isn’t the lack of the right plan or another change-management tool. What matters far more is understanding what’s actually happening inside the system: the assumptions we make, how we react to a loss of control, which patterns we start repeating automatically, and how all of this shapes our communication and decisions.

In my work, I help leaders and teams get to the bottom of exactly these questions. Together we look closely at a difficult situation, examine what’s happening beneath the surface of familiar reactions, and find an approach that fits the specific person, team, and context — rather than applying a one-size-fits-all recipe.