How to Lead When You Can’t Predict Tomorrow
By Angeliki Markopoulou | The Coachultants | June 2026
| Reading time: 5 minutes Related workshop: UNBOUND MIND |
Let’s be honest: the five-year plan has become one of corporate life’s most comforting illusions.
A beautiful deck. Confident numbers. Three strategic pillars. A timeline to 2030. Everyone nods because the story sounds coherent, and because coherence feels safer than doubt.
Then reality walks in. A regulation shifts. A competitor moves. The rules of the category change. The customer changes faster than the planning cycle.
Within eighteen months, the plan is still there. The world it described is not. That is not a failure of leadership. It is a failure of the old planning logic.
The Era That Trained Us Is Over
For decades, strategy rested on a quiet assumption: tomorrow will look like today, only more so. Markets moved at a readable pace. Regulation arrived with a warning. Technology took years to bite. In that world, the long-range plan made sense. Forecast, commit, execute, review, correct.
The data says that the world is gone. In the late 1970s, a company stayed on the S&P 500 for 30 to 35 years on average. This decade, Innosight’s 2021 forecast points to 15 to 20 years. At that rate, half the index might be replaced within ten years.
Chief executives feel it. In PwC’s Global CEO Survey, four in ten CEOs say their company will not be viable beyond the next 10 years, if it continues its current path. Read that again. Four in ten people running the world’s major companies believe their current strategy has an expiry date – inside the very window a five-year plan claims to predict.
Geopolitical shocks reset supply chains overnight. Regulation moves faster than the products it governs. Technology, customers and competitors now move faster than most planning cycles can absorb. This is not a storm to wait out. It is the weather now. Leaders who wait for clarity before acting will, by default, move last.
The Two Traps
To act or not to act – that is the question. Most leadership teams get stuck exactly where Hamlet did: one plan, overwhelming uncertainty, and five acts of brilliant analysis. It did not end well for anyone in that castle. When the ground stops holding still, teams usually fall into one of two traps.
Trap one: paralysis dressed as rigour. More analysis. More scenarios. More data. Studying the problem starts to feel like progress. The plan gets thicker, the decision gets later, and by the time conviction arrives, the window has closed.
Trap two: the heroic bet. Faced with ambiguity, the team picks one direction, pours resources into it, and calls decisiveness a strategy. Sometimes it works. More often, a single large commitment meets a world that has already moved, and there is no way back.
Both traps share the same hidden belief: that one correct answer exists, and the job is to find it and back it up. In a stable market, that’s fair enough. In a volatile one, it is the most expensive idea in the building.
The evidence here is telling. Stefan Thomke of Harvard Business School has spent his career studying business experiments. His finding: even experienced teams see most of their ideas fail when actually tested. At some of the world’s most sophisticated companies, the experts’ predictions miss far more often than they hit. If they cannot pick the winning idea in advance, neither can a leadership team armed with a beautiful, forty-slide deck.
Think Like an Investor, Not a Forecaster
One discipline already knows how to operate when the future cannot be known. Finance has done it for a century.
No serious investor bets everything on one prediction. They build a portfolio: many positions, each small enough to survive if wrong, some expected to fail, yet the winners cover the losers. They do not need to know which holding will eventually win. They need exposure to several holdings, patience while evidence accumulates, and the discipline to cut what is not working.
Apply the same logic to strategy. Instead of one big plan built on one view of the future, run a portfolio of small, disciplined experiments. Each one is a real bet on a different assumption about where the market, the regulation or the technology is heading. You stop trying to be right about tomorrow and start buying information about it cheaply, while your competitors are still arguing in the planning meeting.
The most adaptive companies already work this way. Thomke documents Amazon, Booking.com and Microsoft running tens of thousands of controlled experiments a year. Most fail by design, at a cost too small to matter. A mid-sized Greek business should not copy the volume. It should copy the principle: test many assumptions cheaply and let evidence decide which ones will survive.
In practice, this is concrete. One experiment tests whether a premium segment will really pay the price your model assumes. Another launches small in a single market to see how a coming regulation actually bites. A third puts a simplified product version in front of fifty customers before you tool up the factory. None of them bets the company. Together, they tell you more about the next eighteen months than any forecast can.
I spent close to two decades inside multinational environments, much of it in brand, commercial and corporate strategy. One thing became very clear: the businesses that grew were not always the ones with the best thought-through long-term plan. They were the ones closest to the market, sharpest on consumer truth, fastest at testing ideas – and disciplined enough to stop what did not work, before it drained the next opportunity.
What “Disciplined” Actually Means
This is where the idea usually gets diluted. “Run lots of experiments” becomes a hundred pilots, no learning, and a culture that mistakes motion for progress. A portfolio only works when every test has a budget, a deadline, and a decision rule. Three rules do the work.
- Write the Assumption Down Before You Spend
Every experiment tests one specific belief: this segment will pay, this channel will convert, this regulation will land this way. Name it. Define in advance what result proves it true and what proves it false. An experiment with no clear pass-or-fail test is a costly distraction.
- Make Failure Cheap and Fast
Design the test so that failing costs little and teaches a lot. Reversible decisions should be made quickly, because you can walk back through them. Save the slow, heavy deliberation for the genuinely irreversible. Many leaders do the opposite: they agonise over choices they could undo in a week and rush the ones they can never take back.
- Set the Kill Criteria in Advance
The exit is the hardest part. Before you start, agree what evidence ends the experiment. Sunk cost and personal pride keep dead projects breathing, quietly draining what the winners need. A portfolio works only when losers are closed cleanly and the money, talent and attention move to a more promising route.
Most organisations fail exactly here, and the numbers prove it. McKinsey tracked over 1,600 companies for over 15 years. In many of them, budget allocations rarely changed from one year to the next – the budget was essentially a photocopy of last year’s one. The companies that moved resources towards proven opportunities returned around 10% a year to shareholders. The static ones returned about 6%. Compounded over 20 years, that gap makes the dynamic company worth twice as much. The active movers were also more likely to still exist, to avoid bankruptcy or takeover.
And yet the habit remains rare. PwC finds about half of companies move no more than 10% of their money and people from one year to the next. On average, only 7% of revenue over the past five years came from genuinely new businesses. Leaders know the world has changed. Yet, their budgets do not show it.
Why This Is Harder Than It Looks
None of this is intellectually difficult. The framework is the easy part. The hard part is how leaders think and decide under pressure.
Portfolio thinking asks a leader to keep several possible futures in view and still make decisions. To reason clearly on incomplete information. To distinguish a sound decision from a lucky outcome. Most leaders were promoted for being decisive and certain, i.e. the exact instincts that misfire when things are ambiguous. Structured reasoning under uncertainty has to be built on purpose.
There is a second, quieter challenge. A portfolio approach means leading people through permanent transition – projects that end, directions that shift, teams trained to want certainty now asked to perform without it. People resist change for a simple reason: no one has shown them how to cross the in-between while staying grounded. That capability can be learned.
Where to Start
Do not tear up your strategy on Monday. Change one habit.
Take the single biggest assumption your current plan depends on, the one that would cost you most if it failed. Instead of defending it for another quarter, design the cheapest, fastest test of whether it holds. Set the date. Set the number that means stop. And then run it.
That is how the new approach begins: from defending the plan to testing what must be true. The five-year plan promised a certainty it could never deliver. A disciplined portfolio of experiments offers something more reliable: learning faster than the world changes. In an age of permanent uncertainty, that is the only advantage worth building.
| EXPLORE UNBOUND MIND WORKSHOP →
UNBOUND MIND is The Coachultants’ development workshop for leaders who need to think clearly and decide well in uncertainty. It builds the strategic reasoning, assumption-testing, and decision discipline required to move from rigid long-term planning to faster learning, sharper choices, and more adaptive leadership. Contact us: angeliki@thecoachultants.com | +30 698 452 7162 | thecoachultants.com |
| ABOUT THE COACHULTANTS
The Coachultants is a business transformation consultancy founded by Angeliki Markopoulou, MBA, Meng, a former C-level executive with 25+ years leading teams, brands, and organizational change across multinational environments. |
Research Sources
This article draws on Innosight’s Corporate Longevity Forecast on S&P 500 company tenure, PwC’s 27th–29th Annual Global CEO Surveys on business reinvention and resource reallocation, McKinsey & Company’s multi-decade research on dynamic resource allocation and shareholder returns (Hall, Lovallo and Musters), and Harvard Business School professor Stefan Thomke’s research on business experimentation, including Experimentation Works (Harvard Business Review Press).
