The Conditions Nobody Chose – A Late Summer Sampler on Leading When the Ground Won’t Hold Still
The Conditions Nobody Chose – A Late Summer Sampler on Leading When the Ground Won’t Hold Still
The Conditions Nobody Chose
A Late Summer Sampler on Leading When the Ground Won’t Hold Still
Issue 279, August 27, 2026
A client asked me a question earlier this year. It wasn’t about strategy. It wasn’t about technology, nor about any of the things we are usually brought in for. She asked how she was supposed to plan anything at all.
Her material and operational costs had increased three times in eighteen months. Her pricing had to follow suit as there was little wiggle room in her internal finances. The market answered her by buying less. It is a situation that has affected many organizations of late as financial pressures exist upstream and downstream with seemingly no sign of abating.
Her people were asking for raises because their cost of living was becoming higher and higher. She understood completely as she was feeling her own personal financial pressure, but there wasn’t anything she could do to accommodate their requests.
Two roles she had approved in the spring were still unfilled, and she was no longer sure she would fill them, partly because of budget and partly because of a quieter question nobody in her leadership team wanted to say out loud, which was whether those jobs would exist in the same shape in two years.
She wasn’t panicking. That’s what surprised me. She was competent, clear-eyed, and completely without a stable set of assumptions to build on. She knew it and simply didn’t have the tools or approaches to navigate forward and generate a plan.
That’s the condition I want to dive into this week, because I think it’s the actual environment most of you and your organizations are operating in right now, and because almost none of the current conversation about change and transformation acknowledges it. We talk about change as if organizations always choose it. We talk about transformation as if an organization always chooses it. Increasingly, they don’t. The catalysts for change and transformation are arriving from outside, through prices, through policy, through labor markets, through a technology that’s simultaneously a genuine capability and a convenient reason to stop hiring people.
What This Issue Is
So this week I’m doing something I do a few times a year by drawing from the archive, now past 278 issues, to trace a thread that runs through a great many of them and that has moved from background to foreground.
That thread is conditions. Not strategy, not capability, not intent. The environment surrounding the work, and what impact it has on how people decide, commit, and change.
The pieces offered below were written across five years and several very different societal and business moments. Some were written during a period of optimism that now reads like a foreign country. That’s part of why I’m pulling them forward. Reading what we believed in 2022, 2023, 2024 and even last year against what we know in 2026 is itself a lesson in how quickly the ground moves, and in how confidently we all stood on it at the time.
Four movements, ten pieces.
One. The Conditions Are the Story
Start where most analysis doesn’t, which is with the environment rather than the organization.
Unintended Consequences: Decision-Making and Economic Interconnectedness is the anchor piece for everything that follows. Written in March 2024, it argued that linear problem-solving fails because we don’t trace how a decision moves through an interconnected system. Fix a price, a wage, a border, a supply chain in isolation, and the second and third-order effects arrive later wearing a different face. It walked through PepsiCo’s shrinkflation and Carrefour pulling its products across five European countries, California’s minimum wage and the restaurant prices that followed, Wendy’s short-lived experiment with dynamic pricing. The line I’d point you to is this one. We simply don’t see what we don’t see.
What’s changed is where the consequences originate. That piece assumed disruption accumulating from many independent actors: corporate pricing here, state wage law there, demographics underneath. Much of what’s arriving now comes from fewer sources, moves faster, and reverses. The method holds. The map of where to look for the next effect doesn’t.
Navigating Whiplash: Effective Leadership in the Era of Volatility is the most recent piece in this collection, and at fifteen months old, the oldest thing about it is that it treated whiplash as news. It examined what reversal does to an organization as distinct from what difficulty does, and the distinction still matters. Organizations are far more capable of absorbing bad news than repeated changes of direction. Bad news lets you plan. Reversal makes planning feel foolish, and people stop doing it.
Melanie Vargas put it in a sentence I’ve quoted since: leadership isn’t just about setting a vision and executing a plan, it’s about navigating an unpredictable sea of shifting priorities, conflicting values, rising emotional intensity, and, quite frankly, collective burnout. What I’d add now is that the piece framed adaptive leadership as the response to a period. It’s no longer a period. It’s the operating environment, and the response has to become a practice rather than a posture.
Inflation + True Value was written in February 2022, when 7 percent inflation was the first of its kind since 1982 and food staples had moved 12 percent in a year. The argument was that the reflex to raise prices has to be preceded by a hard look at what value you actually deliver, using outside data rather than internal assumptions, because a price increase unbacked by value gets read as opportunism and remembered as such.
I want to flag one line, because I wrote it as an observation and it has aged into something closer to a forecast. A perfect stormfront of sorts where increased costs are coming from multiple avenues and where there is no point in the future time where those increased costs may decrease. Four years on, that has largely held. What the piece did not anticipate is how many organizations would spend those four years raising prices without ever doing the value work, and how thin the trust account is now with customers and stakeholders as a result.
Workforce Reset, from later that same month, asked whether the workforce was overdue for a fundamental renegotiation. It assembled the evidence of one already underway: the anti-ambition reporting, median job tenure running under three years for workers in their late twenties, pay transparency narrowing the gender gap by as much as 45 percent in the organizations that adopted it, portfolio careers averaging something like twelve jobs across a working life. The through line was leverage. The employee is in the driver’s seat when it comes to reshaping the workplace.
The renegotiation did happen. The leverage moved, and then it moved back. What makes the piece worth rereading in 2026 is what’s missing from it entirely. There is no AI in that picture. The threat to workers in early 2022 was bad management, not automation, and the remedy was for employers to listen. Four years is a very short time for the terms of a negotiation and the psychological contract to reverse that completely.
Two. What Scarcity Does to Decisions
Here’s the part that gets underestimated, and it’s the human factor at the center of this issue. Constrained conditions don’t simply limit what an organization can do. They change how it thinks.
Survival Mode Leadership: The Hidden Costs of Managing by Fear is the most directly applicable piece in this collection. Its argument was that fear-based leadership isn’t strength; it’s insecurity wearing confidence, and that it degrades the organization it’s meant to control. When a leader operates from fear the time horizon collapses, discretion narrows, and the behaviors that produce long-term value are the first things cut. It carried the neurobiology, the ten consequences, and a statistic that did a lot of work: three-quarters of workers have left a job specifically to escape a toxic boss.
That statistic was also the piece’s safety net. It assumed a labor market where mistreated people can walk, which is what made fear-based leadership self-limiting. Take that away and the check disappears. Fear-based leadership under scarcity isn’t just more damaging; it’s more durable, because the people best positioned to name it are the ones least able to leave.
The Risk of Certainty matters more in volatile conditions than in stable ones, for a reason that runs against intuition. Uncertainty is uncomfortable, so under pressure leaders reach for conviction rather than accuracy, and the organization rewards them for it. The piece drew on Zakary Tormala’s work on attitude certainty at Stanford, and on the finding that people grow more confident in a position after defending it, not more correct. It also carried Scott Galloway’s reminder that the species that survive are not the smartest or the strongest but the most adaptable.
Here’s what I’d revise. In January 2024, I framed false certainty as something leaders choose because it’s comfortable. That was too generous to the conditions and too hard on the person. Conditions like these manufacture the demand for certainty. The board wants a number, the staff want a plan, the funder wants a projection, and the leader who says honestly that they don’t know is the one who looks unprepared.
The Misfortunes of Uninformed Urgency carries what’s become one of our longest-standing mantras at 2040. Speed kills with uninformed urgency. The piece built a case study of a media organization in panic, where the CEO hired a friend from a university, who hired a circulation consultant found through a Google search, whose credentials were a subscription model at a company barely holding above the water line. Every department got a contradictory mandate. Sales was told to produce $350,000 however they possibly could. Nobody surveyed the existing subscribers. And no one was talking to each other.
What that piece assumed was self-inflicted panic inside an otherwise functioning organization, with time still available to be deliberate. The urgency now is frequently imposed from outside and the timeline isn’t yours. That doesn’t retire the argument; it sharpens it. Acting quickly is often correct. Acting quickly on an unexamined premise is how you spend scarce resources confirming something that was never true.
Three. The Generational Stake
There’s a dimension of this moment that most business coverage treats as a side issue, and I don’t think it’s one.
Why You Need to Listen to Gen Z was written in spring 2023, and it lands differently now. Its argument was that a generation entering the workforce wanting meaningful work, mental health support, and mentorship rather than lecturing would leave the organizations that dismissed those expectations. The mentorship data was the strongest part: workers with mentors report satisfaction at far higher rates, and retention improves by half.
What dates the piece is the frame. Retention was the employer’s problem. The assumption was that this generation held leverage and organizations needed to adapt or lose them. It predates AI as a factor in entry-level hiring entirely, and entry-level is precisely where AI has landed hardest. A generation that was told to be patient, build skills, and wait its turn is now watching the first rung of the ladder get automated while being asked, by the same institutions, to remain optimistic. Read the piece with that in mind and the reasonable doubts stop looking generational.
The Future of Personal Agency goes underneath the generational framing to the thing actually at stake, which is whether individual effort still reliably connects to individual outcome. When that link weakens, engagement doesn’t decline because people became lazy. It declines because the arrangement stopped being true, and people are good at noticing when it does.
It was written in April 2023, a few months after ChatGPT arrived in public, and it treated 2035 as the horizon. The Pew canvassing at its center found 56 percent of experts expecting that smart systems would not be designed to let humans easily control tech-aided decision-making. Three years in, a good deal of that has arrived early. The line I’d carry forward is the one that reads as a warning and a design principle at once. Whoever writes the code controls the decision-making and its effects on society. Thriving through this requires more agency, not less, and agency is the thing conditions like these quietly withdraw.
Four. Measuring What Matters When the Variables Won’t Sit Still
Which brings us to the question of measurement. If the factors and variables are changing this quickly, how do you measure anything at all?
Measuring What Matters: Navigating the KPI Labyrinth in an Era of Information Overload contains the four questions I still use with every client. What is the purpose of this measure? What will this measure inform? How does this measure connect to other measures? Is this measure still relevant? The piece argued for curation over collection, asking why before what, and building measures that connect rather than sit as isolated tiles. The metrics that got you to here won’t get you there.
In stable conditions, that fourth question is an annual housekeeping exercise. In these conditions, it’s the whole discipline, and it’s the hardest of the four because answering it honestly requires a person to stand behind a removal. There’s also something the piece didn’t contemplate, written as it was for a human reading a dashboard. Your measures are now being read, summarized, and acted on by systems that can’t tell a live measure from a fossil. I’m taking that up properly next week.
And here’s the answer I’d offer to the question directly, because I don’t think it’s the one people expect.
When conditions move quickly, the instinct is to measure more frequently and more broadly, on the theory that a faster-moving world requires faster-moving instrumentation. I think that’s backwards. Faster measurement of unstable quantities produces noise that feels like information, and the organizations I watch struggle most aren’t the ones measuring too little. They’re the ones responding to every fluctuation as though it were a trend.
What holds up when the variables won’t sit still is measurement of the things that change slowly. Trust. Whether people say what they know. Whether decisions close and stay closed. Whether capability actually converts into work. Those are not soft measures. They’re the ones with the longest half-life, and in a volatile environment the long half-life is precisely the point. Anything you can measure this week that will be irrelevant next quarter was never worth building a dashboard around.
What Holds Up
I’ve watched a few things hold when conditions didn’t.
Organizations that stay honest with their people about what’s actually happening retain them at rates the compensation data alone can’t explain. Organizations that keep one commitment slowly, rather than announcing five, rebuild credibility that later becomes the capacity to change. Organizations that treat resistance as information rather than obstruction find out what’s wrong early enough for the knowledge to be worth something.
None of that is a strategy for good conditions. All of it is a practice for bad ones, and the difference between a strategy and a practice is exactly what the next several weeks here will be all about.
Now, The Question
We spend most of our attention on what an organization intends. Strategy, vision, roadmaps, the language of choice and direction.
Almost none of it on what surrounds the organization while it tries to act, even though the conditions decide how much of any intention survives contact with reality.
So rather than end on a question I know you can answer, let me ask one I can’t.
What conditions is your organization actually operating in right now, and how honestly have you named them out loud to the people who have to live inside them?
Write back and tell me. I want to know whether what I’m seeing across client work matches what you’re living through, and I’ll share what I learn in a future issue.
Related Reading
The Case for Strategic Patience (Issue 243). Why knowing when to hold back is a discipline rather than a failure of nerve, and why volatile conditions make it harder and more necessary at once.
The Consequences of Unbounded Optimism. What happens when hope substitutes for planning, and how to hold both without letting one dissolve the other.
Where Has Our Optimism Gone?. Written in a different mood, and worth reading now for what it reveals about how fast a collective outlook can turn.
How Drift Can Derail an Organization. What happens when nobody decides to change direction and the organization changes direction anyway.
Reactive Decision-Making, Social, and Youth. The reactive patterns that pressure produces, and where they show up first.
The Distortion of Time. Why organizational time and human time run at different speeds, and what breaks at the seam.
On The Human Factor Podcast
The Long Game, Season 2 Episode 030. Tom Serena on pace and patience as the denominator of change, and on why you rarely control the pace.
From Diagnosis to Practice, Season 2 Episode 031. The season finale and the map of where Season 3 goes.
Season 3 begins Thursday, September 10. The opening episode takes up the measurement question directly, and the season is built around practice: what it takes to build the human factor into how an organization works when nobody controls the conditions. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube.
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Kevin Novak
Kevin Novak is the Founder & CEO of 2040 Digital, a professor of digital strategy and organizational transformation, and author of The Truth About Transformation. He is the creator of the Human Factor Method™, a framework that integrates psychology, identity, and behavior into how organizations navigate change. Kevin publishes the long-running Ideas & Innovations newsletter, hosts the Human Factor Podcast, and advises executives, associations, and global organizations on strategy, transformation, and the human dynamics that determine success or failure.