How Leaders Move From Reactive To Intentional Leadership In Uncertain Times (Part 1)

Zoe Thompson
Nov 9
9 min read

Why Constant Organisational Change Keeps Leaders In Reactive Mode

The brief changes. Again.

You just told your team the direction, and now the board has made another decision. Before you can even process it, three urgent emails land, two team members need immediate guidance, and you're already calculating how late you'll be working tonight to catch up on the strategic work that keeps getting pushed aside.

This is your reality as a leader right now.

Not because you lack capability or organisational skills. Because you're leading in a VUCA world where volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity have become the norm rather than the exception.

The world hasn't really settled since COVID. One thing after another. It's almost like uncertainty is just how it is now; that this is it, it's just going to be chaotic from here on in.

And what happens when you're leading through constant uncertainty without the right frameworks?

You default to reactive mode. Firefighting becomes your primary leadership activity.

Quick decisions, fast reactions, always responding to what's most urgent rather than what's most important.

You're not a bad leader, despite what the 3am thoughts may be telling you!

You're stuck in reactive patterns that were designed for survival, not sustainable leadership.

a drawing of a stick person scratching their head. In thebackground are lots of squiggly lines in different colours depicting confusion.

How Uncertainty Triggers Reactive Leadership Behaviour

As humans, we like certainty. We like to be able to predict what's happening, we like to know what's going on.

When we're in a phase where there is a lot of uncertainty and we're unable to predict what's happening, that's psychologically very unsettling for us. Unless you're used to being in this environment where it becomes your comfort zone.

I can speak from my experience in the police, where so much of it is uncertain versus certain. Even when you've got a level of certainty about the incident you're dealing with, you've got lots of other factors that can change based on how people react and respond.

Uncertainty triggers our survival mechanism. Fight, flight, freeze. Self-preservation and self-protection kick in. We start making decisions either based on what everybody else is shaping and telling us to do, or we make decisions based on the situation, rather than being really grounded in what's most important and bringing ourselves into the picture.

This is a survival response, not a character flaw.

However, survival responses don't create effective leadership. They create reactive leadership.

When we're so busy trying to react logically and do what we feel needs to be done, it's very easy to be influenced into working in a way that doesn't align with what's most important to us. We risk ending up losing ourselves in the process.

The VUCA Model: Understanding The Chaos You're Leading Through

The VUCA model has been around since the late 1980s, originally used by leaders in the military after the Cold War. It became very popular post-COVID, and in reality, it's never stopped being relevant.

VUCA stands for Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous. These are four distinct types of challenges that leaders face in today's dynamic environment.

Each requires a different type of response, which is why understanding which challenge you're dealing with matters enormously.

Volatility: Rapid and Unpredictable Change

Volatility refers to the speed and unpredictability of change. Things shift quickly, often without warning. Information comes through thick and fast. Multiple decisions need to be made rapidly because the pace is relentless.

This is when your inbox explodes with urgent requests, your calendar fills with emergency meetings, and every conversation starts with "I know this is last-minute, but..."

Market conditions shift suddenly, priorities change overnight, and what worked yesterday might not work tomorrow.

The challenge with volatility isn't that you don't understand what's happening.

The challenge is that it's happening so fast you can barely keep up.

Uncertainty: Unpredictability of Events and Outcomes

Uncertainty occurs when events and outcomes are unpredictable, often because you lack sufficient information. The future is unclear, and even when you have some data, it's difficult to forecast what will happen next.

I know that's probably been one of my biggest frustrations in the past. A decision is made, you think you know what's happening, you brief your team, you're good to go. Then somebody says, "oh, by the way, there's been another meeting, and now this decision has been made".

If that happens over a period of time, you will begin to question - Is it really happening, or shall I just hold off until the next board meeting before I do anything with this?

Uncertainty creates hesitation because you're not sure which direction things will go, or when circumstances might change again.

Complexity: Interconnected Factors Without Clear Cause and Effect

Complexity describes situations where multiple factors are interconnected in ways that make cause-and-effect relationships unclear. You're dealing with interdependent systems where changing one element might create unexpected ripple effects elsewhere.

There are multiple key decision factors creating lots of different options. You try to gather as much information as possible to understand all the moving parts and their relationships.

That can be great in terms of seeing the full picture, but sometimes that gives you analysis paralysis. You can't make any decisions because you've almost got too many variables to consider, and you're not sure which ones matter most or how they influence each other.

Ambiguity: Unclear Meaning Despite Available Information

Ambiguity refers to situations where the meaning of something is unclear, even when you have information available. Different people might interpret the same data differently. Priorities feel hazy. The path forward isn't clear-cut.

This is different from uncertainty. With uncertainty, you don't have enough information. With ambiguity, you might have plenty of information, but what it all means and what you should do about it, remains unclear.

That conscious incompetence where you're very aware that something doesn't quite add up, but you can't pinpoint exactly what's missing or how to interpret what you're seeing.

Quite often, that's where overthinking creeps in, or second-guessing, because even with information in front of you, confidence in the right direction eludes you.

Why Understanding These Distinctions Matters

In the UK right now, we've got examples of all four.

Volatility in market conditions and political changes. Uncertainty about economic direction and policy decisions. Complexity in global supply chains and interconnected systems. Ambiguity in conflicting information and unclear priorities.

The critical insight is that these are four distinct challenges requiring four distinct responses.

Treating them all the same, or assuming one approach works for everything, keeps you stuck in reactive mode.

Why Reactive Leadership Creates Chaos Despite Feeling Productive

When we're in reactive mode, it's incredibly draining because we're constantly responding to whatever fires up next.

When we slip into reactive leadership with fast, automatic reactions, it feels very productive because we can tell ourselves we're doing something. We're making decisions, we're taking action, we're being responsive.

However, we are often creating a lot more chaos in the process.

When I first started working in the call centre with the police, it was a brand new department. At one point in the very early days, there were more leaders than there were staff because we were in the recruitment phase.

It was chaos, and it was chaos because all of the new leaders were all trying to make their mark and everybody was trying to make decisions.

You couldn't go to the bathroom without coming back and another decision had been made and you were going off in another direction!

None of it was useful at all. It was all small, inconsequential decisions. It caused absolute chaos.

Most definitely noise and confusion.

This, over time, especially if you're communicating these decisions out, takes away clarity. People will question the decisions you're making, and that can impact your confidence, but also other people's confidence in you as well.

Why Intentional Leadership Helps Build Team Trust

For business owners, the best thing about running your own business is that you get to decide how you want to work, and if you want to do something different, you can make a different decision and do things differently. It is similar for those in senior leadership and in decision making roles, with a significant circle of influence.

This ability is great, but the frequency with which we do that, and how we communicate that, can either increase confidence or it can erode confidence because it just confuses people.

How you make those decisions, how you communicate you're making those decisions, the level of openness and transparency you give when sharing with your teams matters enormously.

You don't want to keep making different decisions and saying, oh, this is what we're doing now. If you literally made a decision the day before and now you're sending them off in a different direction, you need to communicate why things have changed.

What information came in that resulted in you making a different decision? The more you can communicate the reasoning, the better. But what we don't want is to be in that reactive state where decisions feel arbitrary.

We want very intentional responses. Still fast, still quick decision-making, still quick action, but intentional action, not reactive action.

Reacting Versus Responding: The Leadership Difference That Matters

Reflect on how you naturally react, versus how you want to intentionally respond.

How you naturally react will be based on the beliefs you hold and how you've learned to respond in these situations over time. It's automatic. It's fast. It's your default pattern.

What we want to do is slow yourself down in the situation, so you can move from automatic reaction to intentional response.

We're not slowing the situation down. We're slowing how you are in that situation down.

A lot of how we face challenges is learned and repetitive behaviours. These patterns got established because they worked at some point in our lives.

Maybe they kept you safe, maybe they helped you survive a difficult period, maybe they earned you recognition.

But survival patterns don't create sustainable leadership.

What Teams Need From Leaders During Uncertainty

Leadership isn't having all the answers. In my experience, the best leaders are the ones who are very comfortable with saying, "I don't know that answer", I" don't have that answer", and being okay with other people in the room knowing more and knowing better.

Most people do not look for their leaders to have the answers. If you've got confident, empowered staff with high levels of self-efficacy, they don't want the answers from you.

They want direction. They want decisions made. They want you to create that momentum for them to follow.

What they're looking for is clarity. They're looking for you to be confident in leading them forward. They want to feel that there's momentum; they want to feel that you are helping them all move forward together.

They're not looking for perfect answers. They're looking for clarity and confident decision-making, even when you don't have all the information.

Recognising Your Reactive Leadership Patterns

We cannot control uncertainty, however, we can control how we approach it. We slip into reactive leadership because it's a survival mechanism. It's that feeling of wanting to be in control because we don't like not to be in control.

Sometimes that looks like slowing everything down, trying to gather more information before making any moves. Sometimes it's speeding everything up because we just want to get out the other side of this discomfort. We rush those reactions, we rush that decision-making process because we're trying to move forward and through this as quickly as possible.

Both approaches are an attempt to regain control through our actions, however, they keep us stuck in reactive mode.

When you lead reactively, you're over-controlling everything instead of empowering your team.

You're overthinking before decisions or second-guessing after.

You're exhausted from constantly firefighting.

You're fear-driven rather than values-driven.

You're creating chaos while thinking you're being productive.

When you lead intentionally, you're empowering and building capability in your team. You're decisive without overthinking or second-guessing.

You're energised because you feel more in control of your responses.

You're values-driven and aligned with what matters most.

You're creating clarity and momentum.

The question isn't whether you're a good leader or a bad leader.

The question is, where have you been reacting rather than responding intentionally?

Understanding the VUCA model and recognising your reactive patterns is the first step.

The transformation happens when you learn to lead intentionally through uncertainty, anchored to what matters most rather than pulled by whatever feels most urgent.

In Part 2 of this series, I'll share the practical frameworks and tools that transform reactive leadership into intentional leadership. You'll learn how to use your values as your anchor when everything else is shifting, the decision-making framework that keeps you aligned with what matters most, and the weekly practices that help you lead with clarity and confidence even when circumstances keep changing.

Good leadership is not centred around working harder or pushing through. The focus is leading differently so you can finish work on time, make confident decisions without second-guessing, and build the sustainable success that feels as good as it looks.

Read Part 2: HERE

Zoe

If you're ready to take this further, I can help.

I support leaders and business owners to balance their ambition with the habits and behaviours that create aligned success, success that feels as good as it looks.

I do this through: