How DO we lead through uncertainty?
Our 2025 Critical Thinking is live...
Last week, we published our 2025 Critical Thinking, our biggest piece of thinking to date. There’s some really dark serendipity at play in publishing it at this moment, when the systems of power, trust, relationships, geoeconomics, reputation, and democracy are no longer fracturing but tearing at the seams.
We asked the first version of this question for our fifth podcast series at the end of 2024, before a new Labour government, before Donald Trump’s mark two and since then, our uncertainty has only compounded. As I say in my introduction, if there is one thing the last twelve months has proven, it is that uncertainty is not a condition or a crisis to manage; it is our constant.
This fracturing is showing up everywhere: in the gap between what we say and what we do, what our businesses actually reward, in quarterly metrics that often punish long-term innovation, in AI promising efficiency whilst threatening the critical thinking that ensures the right outcome and in our own self-worth or lack thereof to question how we lead and why we lead.
We’re operating in systems designed for a world that no longer exists, we’re drowning in information—more data, more analysis, more content than we could ever process, but we’re starving for coherence. A shared way to make sense of what we already know and the confidence to actually act on it.
So we spent twelve months finding it.
It was somewhat meta to be asking this question at a time when I was/ am also feeling the impacts of the uncertainty in my own business. One Question sits in the middle of business, policy, and community, asking questions to explore tensions, challenges, and opportunities that are constantly evolving, changing, and breaking—and at speed—so for the last twenty-four months I have been looking in a mirror, which is not always comfortable.
We’re a small business, and we punch well above our weight, and this piece of thinking is not just the culmination of nine conversations on the 7th of October, but twelve months of questions across market and industry, finding new perspectives, themes, ideas and many answers that we brought together in the Autumn to answer last year’s One Question.
From Simon Rogerson at Octopus Group on values as an operating system to Stephanie Ankrah, Nike on how we balance risk to protect ten-year brand strategies, to Daniel Hulme from WPP challenging us on what AI actually costs when we remove the friction that creates meaning, to Ros Wynne-Jones from The Daily Mirror asking what happens when nations stop recognising themselves in the stories told by others. And so much more.
What developed was a pattern, a blueprint for how we lead, tied together in a conclusion from our advisor, Marshall Manson and, of course, our own Many Answers.
Leadership is no longer held solely at the top; I am not sure it ever was, comfortably or effectively, but more so now than ever before it’s distributed, it emerges in our behaviour long before it’s formalised in any structure. So for me, I have never seen uncertainty just as a limitation, it is something to get better at, it’s an invitation to design more carefully, to lead less fearfully, and to build organisations capable of adapting and innovating without breaking.
My hope is our thinking provides many answers on how we do that, how you can apply it your challenges, big and small, to find new inspiration, find new commercial opportunity, and to answer your one question.
The full Critical Thinking is for our community, but we have created a summary that you can read here.
I’d love to hear what you think, what resonates with the challenges you’re facing and what doesn’t, what feels useful or what feels like we’ve missed something.
Over the course of the next few months I am taking this thinking into organisations as a 90-minute briefing, exploring the challenges your leadership teams are facing. If you are keen to find out more, or would like to become part of the One Question community, drop me a note.
If I am certain about one thing, it is that none of us have all the answers.