Most CEOs think that they are facing an uncertainty problem. What they're actually facing is a design problem that uncertainty just made impossible to ignore.
Hey there, senior leader, and welcome to the Talent Sherpa Podcast, where senior leaders come to rethink how human capital really works. I'm your host, Jackson Lynch. And today we're going to be starting with a number that I think deserves a lot more attention than it's getting.
Forty-three percent of U.S. CEOs name uncertainty as their number one external threat. Not a downturn, not a recession, not a specific competitor, or even a regulatory risk. Uncertainty itself.
And the U.S. ranks higher on that measure than anywhere else in the world — higher than Asia Pacific, higher than Europe, higher than markets that by any objective measure are way more volatile.
So here's what the number I think should tell you, if you're willing to sit with it. The obvious explanation is that CEOs are caught at the center of every macro disruption in motion right now. Tariffs, geopolitical tension, AI moving faster than anyone else can govern. All of that's real, and that's what the Conference Board said you should take from it. But I think the number also tells you something about organizational design.
The companies that are feeling uncertainty most acutely built themselves for predictability — tight hierarchies, centralized decision making, quarterly performance cycles. Those organizations stall when conditions shift because the design depends on the information moving reliably to a central point that can issue reliable direction. And when that environment moves faster than the information loop, the whole system breaks.
So if you're an HR leader watching your CEO struggle to get traction, or you're watching your own organization grind where it used to move, this episode is for you. This is a talent and decision rights story. Diagnosing it correctly changes what you can do about it.
Now, before we get into today's episode, I want to take a moment for a quick thank you. Shout out this week to Matt from London. Matt and I had a genuinely great time taping his show last week, and I'm looking forward to when that episode's going to drop. We'll share that here as well. Thank you for having me, and thank you for being a part of this community. And thank you to everyone who's tuning in today, whether you're listening from Norfolk, Virginia, or whether you're out on the coast of Tamarindo, Costa Rica. And by the way, if you're in Tamarindo right now, I hope you're between surf lessons. My wife and I got married down the road from there, and I can tell you that the beach does not deserve to share your attention with a podcast. And if you choose this show from that coastline, I deeply respect your commitment to the work. And for everybody else, I appreciate you being here too. All right, let's dive into this.
Here's what I think the world looks like inside organizations right now. Uncertainty hits the senior layer first. The CEO, they're getting the signal. Conditions are shifting. The operating plan doesn't hold the way it did in the good old days, otherwise known as six months ago.
And the call that used to be obvious isn't necessarily obvious anymore. The board wants confidence. The investors want clarity. And the instinct in nearly any organization I've seen navigate this is to pull decision making tighter — more frequent check-ins, more escalation requirements, more visibility funneled to the center. It feels like control. It functions, though, like compression.
When decision making pulls towards the top, two things happen simultaneously. The senior layer absorbs more volume than their bandwidth allows, and that execution layer freezes because they're waiting on signals that aren't coming. The organization slows in both directions at the same time.
Now, a few episodes back I talked about mandate clarity and the idea that initiative without a mandate is just noise and calories. And that's the same dynamic operating at a systems level. When people don't know what they're authorized to decide, they stop deciding. And stopped decisions in a moving environment compound.
So here's what this looks like in practice, I think.
A regional sales leader has a pricing opportunity in front of them. It's nonstandard. It requires a margin judgment call. Six months ago, they would have made that call themselves. They had enough operating context to calibrate.
And now, with the world moving in different directions and at pace, they escalate because the environment has everyone unsure where the lines are. CFO is running down three other fires. The review takes two weeks. The window closes. The deal surfaces as a reporting item after the fact — not as a decision anyone could have influenced in real time. And you lose the deal.
No one in that sequence did anything wrong. The system wasn't designed for the speed at which the environment is now moving.
Now that pattern plays out across functions, across levels, across decisions that should take hours and instead now take weeks. The aggregate cost is real, and it shows up in slower execution, missed windows, the compounding frustration of people who have the judgment to act, but they're not quite sure what they're authorized to do. They knew six months ago, they don't know anymore.
The talent piece adds a second layer that I think is even harder to see on a dashboard. Some of the people who were excellent in a stable environment are quieter than they used to be. Not absent per se, not visibly underperforming, but not calling it either.
And what organizations need right now are people who can operate with partial information and make a reasonable call. The people who can do that — it's not evenly distributed across a typical leadership bench. The distribution matters more than it used to and needs to be tied up with people who have decision authority.
Now, the first thing that trips leaders up is trying to confuse decision speed with decision clarity. The assumption is the answer to uncertainty is faster decisions, oftentimes at the top. Tighter information, compressed review cycles, move faster. The real question, though, is decision clarity at the edge. Who is authorized to call the ball under what conditions with what information? Those are entirely different problems. Solving for process when the issue is design produces faster noise, not better outcomes — that's where it falls through.
What most leaders, I think, are struggling with is that this gets misdiagnosed as a people problem or a behavior problem. The advice circulating right now is build around mindset, communicate more, be decisive, bring solutions not problems. All of those are directionally reasonable — I've probably even said them. They're structurally insufficient, however.
And when decision rights are genuinely ambiguous, even the most capable, confident leader will hesitate. I bet you've been there. Not because you're slow or risk-averse, but because you don't know what you're authorized to do anymore. Mindset coaching, as awesome as it might be, doesn't fix a design problem. Neither do words on the wall, or a really motivational speech at the all-hands.
Now the third thing that I think is involved in this — it gets a little harder to see, and it's the one most relevant to CHROs here specifically. The talent mismatch in an uncertain environment looks like steadiness. The leaders who need a stable operating context to perform at their best are hitting their numbers. They're managing their teams, they are showing up consistently. They're just not operating well at the edge where conditions are moving and someone has to make a call without the full picture.
You can't really see that gap on a standard scorecard. You can see it in the decisions that weren't made, the windows that had passed, and the accumulated weight of a bench that was calibrated for a completely different environment.
Now, here's the thing that I think changes how you can see all of this. Uncertainty will reveal a structural problem that was already there to begin with. It's not new. It doesn't break things necessarily. The problems showing up in your organization right now were present before the environment shifted. Uncertainty is what made them impossible to keep managing around.
The organizations feeling this most acutely are caught in what I think is a structural problem that predates the current macro environment by years, maybe even decades. So when you point to tariffs or geopolitics or AI — come on — those are context. The design of the organization is the root cause.
The decision rights architecture in most American companies was built for an environment where information could travel up the hierarchy fast enough for centralized leaders to make good calls. Now you might be sitting here saying, "Oh, we don't do it that way in my company." Okay, here's the one question to ask: go talk to your head of legal and ask them for the delegation of authority document that they share with the board. Who gets to make what decisions, up to what amounts? And have those changed now that the speed has increased?
If the answer is no, then I might be onto something here. Because look, when conditions were predictable and the information loop was genuinely reliable, that assumption held. The system worked. But when the environment moves faster than information can travel, the system doesn't adapt. It just breaks.
What's happening right now is that thousands of American organizations are discovering their design decisions and their assumptions in real time.
Now here's the part that your international leaders probably recognize before I even finish the sentence. The reason the U.S. number is higher than any other country is not accidental. The American operating model optimized for performance in a predictable environment. Quarterly earnings cycles, aggressive growth targets, decision rights concentrated at the most senior layers. Those choices produced compliance and even speed and alignment when conditions hold. They carry very little structural buffer when the conditions shift.
However, our friends in Europe and Asia and South America — and other members of the Talent Sherpa community — built operating models with more distributed decision rights, longer planning horizons, and governance structures that are not purely optimized for short-term performance. In a stable environment, those models feel slower. In a volatile one, they absorb disruption instead of amplifying it.
So the American CEO who named uncertainty as their number one threat made an optimizing bet when conditions were predictable. The cost of that bet is being paid right now at a scale that nobody fully anticipated. And the uncertainty is the trigger. The design is the source of the drag, at least in my opinion.
And that drag lives inside the organization in decision rights architecture, in the talent deployment, and in the gap between where authority sits and where the action is. That distinction matters because it changes where the intervention belongs.
The fix belongs at the design layer. Who is authorized to decide? What information can they access? Which people are deployed where judgment under uncertainty is the actual job — and have you even screened for that? Have you told people what's appropriate? All of this is a decision rights story. It's a talent story, and it starts with the CHRO being willing — I think — to name it that way.
So what do you do come Monday morning? Play one: map your decision rights against your current operating environment.
Now, everyone makes tons of decisions. For this one, go for your 10 most common decisions the organization has to make under pressure — think about pricing calls, resource reallocation, supply chain decisions, scope changes, personnel moves, escalation — those kinds of things. For each one, identify where the decision actually lands in the hierarchy versus where it probably should land given the speed at which your environment's currently moving.
What I think you're going to find in almost every organization that I've seen do this is that decisions are routing one level higher than they need to. That one level, by the way, costs time. In a stable environment, that cost is manageable. Right now it's not. The map tells you where to redistribute authority before the next pressure cycle hits.
Here's play number two. Identify your uncertainty-tolerant talent and move them into the forward-deployed positions. That's a brand new title — I think I'm going to have to trademark that.
Look, not everyone is built to operate well with partial information. And that's not a judgment. That's a real variance in how leaders are wired. Some people get clearer under pressure. Some people step into that void. They make reasonable calls with incomplete data. They recalibrate without needing the full picture, and they communicate confidence even when the answer isn't clear yet. They don't know whether they made it good.
Those people need to be in positions closest to the operational edge right now. Know who they are. If they're in staff roles or supporting functions, the current environment is sitting on the most valuable capability they have. So you might want to move them forward.
Play number three: run a 90-day decision audit with your senior team. I know that sounds like a lot of fun, but hang with me.
Look at the last quarter and find three things: what decisions got escalated that shouldn't have, which decisions went sideways because the person making them lacked the authority to access the right information, and which decisions are still unmade. The third category is the most expensive, and usually it's the easiest one to miss in a review meeting.
When you do this, the audit doesn't produce a report — it produces a redesign conversation. You're looking for the pattern. What in the design produced the outcomes, and what changes to authority, information and access, or even role mandate would prevent them next quarter?
Play four: define what "sufficient to proceed" actually looks like today. One of the invisible costs of uncertainty is that organizations raise their threshold for action. They wait for more data, they want another review cycle, they want to make sure before they commit. In a volatile environment, waiting is itself a decision — and it's almost the most expensive one available.
So work with your CEO and your operating leadership to explicitly define the conditions for action in your most consequential decision categories. What information is sufficient? What level of risk is acceptable? What time frame requires a call even when the picture is incomplete? And what are you going to do if someone makes a bad call? Like, pre-plan that. They will. How are you going to respond?
Because when all of those conditions are explicit, that gives people the permission structure to act. When they're not, people wait. And when things are moving fast — like they are right now — waiting costs more than imperfect decisions would have.
Now, here's the honest version of what I just asked you to do. All four of these plays are going to require the people at the top to give up some control — not recklessly, not one-way doors, but giving up some control. And for a certain type of leader, the kind who got to where they are by having better answers faster than everyone else around them, that suggestion is going to probably land as well as telling someone to ease off the wheel on a mountain road. I understand. I understand. I'm just pointing out that the road has changed.
Now, if you end up taking one thing from today, let it be this: the uncertainty your organization is feeling right now is a message about design choices. And those design choices were made when the environment was predictable. So thank you for spending some time with me today. I appreciate you being a part of this community of senior leaders who not only are rethinking how human capital really works, but are willing to sit with a hard question and actually work through it.
And if you're sitting here thinking about how to apply any of this to your own organization, let me point you to a couple of resources. Propulsion AI is workforce intelligence for private equity. Their AI teammates surface workforce risk before close, and they help leadership teams drive execution after. They translate strategy into individual accountability, coach managers to define roles by outcomes, and give every employee a clear line of sight to what actually matters. It's really good stuff. You can learn more at the very cleverly named getpropulsion.ai.
And if you're heading into the CHRO seat for the first time, or you're close to it, or maybe you're in it but got a brand new CEO, all of these are why I built mytalentsherpa.com. Everything's there: the Substack, the podcast — you already found that one — the CHRO Ascent Academy, the CHRO Chronicles, and recently the Mandate Protocol, which is only $297, money-back guarantee for two weeks if you don't think it's worth it.
And that's it for today. Until next time, keep raising the bar. Keep designing for the environment you're actually in, and keep on climbing.
