When Certainty Is Dead: What high-performing leaders do differently in an AVUCA world

By Mark Nolan, Deputy Managing Partner at Genesis

Here's the paradox keeping senior leaders awake: you have more data, more tools, and more computational power than ever before. Yet the path ahead has never felt more uncertain.

Every conversation with Irish leadership teams surfaces the same tension: "How do we build a winning strategy when the future is not only uncertain but also increasingly changing at an accelerated rate?”

Get this wrong, and the cost is brutal. Five-year plans become obsolete before the ink dries. Teams that outsource thinking to Artificial Intelligence lose their ability to adapt. Organisations chasing every trend exhaust themselves without gaining ground.

But there's a different story playing out. Some leaders are winning amidst this chaos. They're growing faster, engaging teams more deeply, and shaping markets rather than reacting to them. The difference isn't luck or resources. It's a fundamentally different way of thinking.

From working with leadership teams, we see three shifts that are separating those who are surviving and those who are thriving:

1. They hold the tension between certainty & experimentation

2. They put understanding ahead of automation & AI

3. They embrace and build sensemaking as capability & competitive advantage

1. Holding the Tension: Control & certainty versus experimentation & change

Organisation leaders have always had to navigate the future beset with volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity (VUCA). However the world is no longer just VUCA, it is becoming increasing AVUCA, that is accelerating volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity.

This AVUCA reality kills traditional leadership approaches and playbooks. The leader who promises a perfect five-year plan is either lying or delusional. The future won't stand still long enough for that plan to work.

Yet chaos isn't the answer either. Leaders who are winning hold two opposing forces in tension: absolute clarity of purpose paired with thoughtful experimentation.

Whilst experimentation is required, an organisations’ purpose is its anchor. It answers "What do we exist to do?" For a manufacturing company, that might be "We deliver supply chain resilience for our customers." Everyone from the factory floor to the C-suite knows what that means for their daily work. It's the north star that lets people make decisions without waiting for permission.

But purpose without action is just wishful thinking. However fixed playbooks over 5 year horizons are increasingly unfit in an AVUCA reality, there is a necessity for controlled flexibility in execution against the purpose over rigid execution roadmaps. Leaders and organisations who are succeeding are adopting structures for rapid testing, they are running controlled pilots before major investments, they are reviewing strategic assumptions regularly, and are building feedback loops that let teams adjust based on what the market is actually telling them, not what a plan assumed six months ago.

The tension between control and adaptation doesn't disappear. You simply stop treating it as a problem to solve and start treating it as the environment you operate in. Change isn't a flaw to fix; it's the system you must build for.

The leaders thriving today choose motion over perfection and learning over certainty. However, they simultaneously anchor that motion in an authentic purpose and compelling vision. Without this anchor, it's chaos. Without the motion, it's theatre.

2. Understanding Before Automation: Why Your AI Strategy Is Probably Wrong

We're also witnessing something troubling: an arms race to deploy AI for its own sake. Pilots launched to check a box, tools adopted because competitors have them and "Digital transformation" initiatives designed to satisfy board questions rather than create value.

This approach produces expensive noise, not competitive advantage.

Let's be clear about what AI isn't:

• It's not a cognitive surrogate that thinks for you

• It's not a cure for corporate FOMO for leaders who feel their competitors are moving ahead with AI

• It's not a toolkit to bolt onto broken processes (that just automates the “brokenness” faster)

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The real opportunity in AI is targeted value creation, driven by leadership intent and organisational wide systems, and most importantly grounded in specific outcomes you actually want to bring about.

This requires four disciplined steps, and most organisations fail at step one:

• First, understand the problem or opportunity deeply, not superficially. This requires identification of what’s actually happening beneath the symptoms, and being clear on what the root causes are?

• Second, clarify the outcome. This is not "use machine learning" or "build a predictive model. This is about being clear and explicit about what winning looks like, understanding which metrics move, by how much & when. This rigor prevents the drift that happens when projects have no clear finish line.

• Third, build the intelligence layer. This is where organisations can struggle in skipping to technology. They don't have the right data, they haven't developed insight through human analysis first. Without this foundation, you build models and AI “solutions” that look sophisticated but fail in the real world as they don’t have the foundational insight layer and supporting data.

• Then, and only then, consider automation. Now the technology conversation makes sense, and questions such as what's the right tool, How do we integrate and monitor it, How do we adapt when conditions change, are ready to be asked and answered clearly.

Here's what really separates high performers: they slow down before they speed up. They do the thinking before deploying the tools.

And here's why intelligence can't sit in a separate team: we've watched organisations hire brilliant data scientists, isolate them, and wonder why nothing changes. The insight stays trapped; the business doesn't internalise it or act on it.

Intelligence must become foundational to how you operate, and only then do you amplify it with targeted automation and create real value.

The next generation of leaders who really flourish will treat intelligence not as an add-on, but as a core capability woven into strategy, culture, and decision-making of their organisation in reality and not as a siloed function or team operating on the periphery to the main operations of the business.

3. The Irreplaceable Skill: Sensemaking

Here's what's counterintuitive about the AVUVA world: the most valuable leadership skill is becoming more human, not less. It's called sensemaking; the ability to interpret signals, shape ambiguity, and convert insight into action and growth. It's fast becoming the defining strategic skill of this decade.

Sensemaking isn't strategy development or scenario planning, though it draws on both. It's about making meaning in real time as your environment shifts. It's having the humility to notice when you're wrong and the agility to act on that notice before your competitors do.

In practice, sensemaking means:

• Scanning continuously for emerging signals; not obvious trends, but early indicators. The customer complaint appearing in three unrelated conversations. The shift in competitor hiring. The policy shift that is gaining momentum but yet to be announced.

• Interpreting early, before everyone else sees it. Raw data doesn't give you meaning. "Customer satisfaction is down 3%". So what? Is it noise, a temporary friction point, or perhaps a sign competitors are winning? This requires judgment.

• Challenging assumptions relentlessly. Every organisation has sacred cows: "Our customers will always value X." "Our market grows at Y rate." Good sense makers constantly ask: is this still true, and what would prove us wrong?

• Convening diverse perspectives. The people closest to problems often see shifts before executives do. Sensemaking organisations create psychological safety to surface those perspectives and actually listen.

• Embracing intellectual humility. Leaders wedded to being right don't sense make, they defend. Leaders who say "I was wrong, here's what we learned, here's what we're changing" build organisations that adapt and grow.

• Translating insight into adaptive action. You notice something, test a response, learn, and adjust. Speed trumps perfection.

Why does this matter more in the AI age? Because AI excels at finding patterns in historical data. It's brilliant at optimisation, but it doesn't understand context. AI doesn't notice when rules are changing, and lacks the judgment to break its own model when the world shifts.

That's human work. Strategic work. Leadership work.

Leaders who are winning are treating sensemaking as a deliberate practice, the best are doing this consciously and deliberately, whilst others are doing this instinctively. They are training leaders to notice better, building cultures where dissent is valued, creating feedback loops so frontline insight reaches decision-makers quickly. They're using AI to augment human judgment, not replace it.

The path ahead won't become clearer, the pace won't slow, the questions won't simplify, but there's real reason for optimism. We're entering a future that rewards leaders who are curious, adaptive, and learning faster than their environment is changing. A future where human and machine intelligence together amplify our ability to make sense of complexity and act with clarity.

The future rewards the fastest learners.

Three principles to carry forward:

1. Treat uncertainty as a feature, not a flaw. Build for adaptability, not false stability. Stop pretending you can predict the future and start building capacity to shape it and embrace the ambiguity.

   
   

2. Understanding must precede automation. You cannot outsource your thinking to AI or delegate it to a separate team. This isn't a technology project, it's a leadership project.

   
   

3. Invest in sensemaking. The ability to interpret and create meaning in ambiguity is the defining leadership skill of our time. Train leaders to notice better. Surface dissenting views and frontline insights. Create feedback loops that enable speed.

This isn't about reacting to change. It's about shaping the future you want to create.

At Genesis, we see it every day: the leaders who experiment, build, and learn are gaining real advantage. They're faster and outmanoeuvring competitors because they've changed how they think.

The future is accelerating. The question isn't whether you'll face it. The question is whether you'll be ready.

The leaders who embrace this emerging mindset, who hold purpose and experimentation together, who treat intelligence as foundational, who develop genuine sensemaking capability, don't just survive acceleration.

They thrive in it.

And so can you.