How to lead when nobody knows what’s coming

“If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you, yours is the world, and everything that’s in it.” —Rudyard Kipling Right now, CEOs are confronting a grim reality. The global trade system that has underpinned business planning is unravelling. Ships pile up in harbor, supply chains that have taken years to build are being undermined, and the diplomatic relations that hold world trade together are fraying. The most destabilizing feature of our current situation is the uncertainty it breeds about the future. If leaders could reliably predict the next catastrophe, at least they could plan and prepare for it. But right now, the ground rules of global commerce (and global politics, but that is a separate story) are being rewritten in real time, and nobody can say where the next chapter will lead us. The natural human response to this kind of uncertainty is twofold. We try to reduce it and we try to control it. This kind of response is very understandable