In times of uncertainty, clinging to the past can be a dangerous trap.

Real leadership emerges when you stop looking backward and start creating the future.

Each day brings conflictive pathways and choices that shape what the future will become. What leaders need are perspectives and practices that help face that hardship head-on, navigate uncertainty with clarity, and keep their endeavors moving forward in a changing world.

Political upheaval. Economic volatility. Global unrest. It's tempting to believe that if we just wait long enough, "normal" will return. It won't! …and that's a good thing. Why? Because today’s leaders must face an uncomfortable truth: stability and certainty are only illusions. The sooner we release the idea of “returning to normal," the sooner we can unlock creativity, choices, and focus needed to build a desirable future. Leadership is never about preserving the past; it is about creating something beyond the predictable.

The history of U.S. manufacturing shows “normal” is a moving target. Since 1979, manufacturing employment has declined by more than 7 million jobs, a disturbing statistic. Yet during that same period, the US gross domestic product has roughly quadrupled, rising from about 7 to 27 trillion dollars. What actually happened is that the U.S. moved from a primarily industrial economy to one driven by innovation, technology, and globalization.

America remains one of the most productive economies in the world, but it’s no longer the same as in the past. Sectors like technology, entertainment, professional services, finance, healthcare, and education now account for more than 77% of U.S. GDP. Instead of relying on "sweat and brawn", it’s now an economy built on knowledge, creativity, and entrepreneurship. ¹ Companies that succeeded leaned into that transformation, not back.

Companies That Changed the World Didn’t Look Back

Some of the world’s most iconic companies emerged during periods of deep uncertainty and economic turmoil, built by people who faced the new circumstances head-on and dared to create something different. During the Great Depression of 1929, Walt Disney founded his namesake company, offering audiences a rare gift amid widespread despair: hope and imagination. As Disney once said, "It's kind of fun to do the impossible," and through this vision, he brought joy to millions during one of America’s darkest times.

Less than a decade later, during the recession of 1938, Hewlett-Packard took shape in a Palo Alto garage. As co-founder David Packard said: "Innovation is not about predicting the future, it's about creating it.".  Their commitment to forward-thinking set the foundations for what would become one of the world's leading technology companies. ​

In 1975, as the economy struggled, Microsoft and Apple were born, betting on a personal computer revolution before most households had ever seen one. Decades later, amid the financial chaos of 2008, Airbnb and Uber emerged, using technology and flexibility to reinvent the hospitality and transportation industries. None of these companies succeeded by trying to restore the past. They thrived because their founders looked forward, imagining what could be, even when circumstances were harsh and uncertain.

History shows that efforts to protect the past rarely succeed in restoring it. In the face of upheavals, businesspeople operating as leaders release any "hope" of returning to what once was and instead focus on inventing futures that align with the way the world is actually transforming.

You Can’t Predict the Future — But You Can Create It

David Packard had it right: “The best way to predict the future is to create it.”

Versions of this quote have been credited to leaders from Abraham Lincoln to Peter Drucker, Alan Kay, and Steve Zaffron - and for good reason. Leadership, almost by definition, is about the future. It’s about building the future through a powerful articulation of it and decisive coordinated action.

But how do leaders create that action? By engaging in new kinds of conversations. Executives become leaders when they start and sustain visionary conversations. You can’t create a future by repeating the same arguments, reiterating the same assumptions, or dusting off yesterday’s strategies to solve today’s challenges. In this context, leaders are not the ones titled in organizational charts. Leaders are ordinary people with an extraordinary commitment to something not predictable. Their ability to lead any organization begins with recognizing that, at its core, every organization is a Network of Conversations. Conversations about what it takes to produce results on the short, medium, and long terms, and deal with whatever is happening inside it and out in the world. These conversations aren’t just talk. “They are” the organization. “They are” the coordinated actions that define organizations thriving in chaos.

In most organizations, the prevailing conversations are past-based conversations. They focus on preserving what exists and shaping what’s next by protecting incremental gains and avoiding risks. Past-based conversations anchor people to what has already happened, and as a result, they limit what individuals and teams could see as possible.

Leaders, however, create a different conversational environment. They generate future-based conversations. Conversations that begin with a declared future that is desirable and yet not predictable. Future-based conversations do not deny current reality; they liberate people from being confined by it. They unleash new ways of thinking, acting, and collaborating in service of the declared future that would not occur otherwise.

When leaders make this shift - from past-based to future-based conversations - their organizations themselves are left transformed. Disney, HP, Microsoft, Apple, Airbnb, Uber, and others illustrate the impact of being future driven in times of uncertainty and chaos.

The question then becomes: how do you go about leading future-based conversations in your organization?

Four Essential Shifts to Stop Managing the Past & Start Creating the Future

Every organization lives inside two futures. The predictable one that will happen with management only, and the desirable future that requires leadership.

The four shifts below are an access for leaders to realign the conversations in their organizations.

First Shift – Identify with precision the conditions of your game and how they occur to your team.

Every enterprise faces conditions such as supply chain issues, economic volatility, or political uncertainty, among others. Those are just circumstances and must be dealt with. What matters is how those circumstances occur to you and your organization. When they occur as fixed barriers, people act cautiously. When those same circumstances occur as openings for innovation, people and teams act boldly.

Leaders, as we defined above, “ordinary people with an extraordinary commitment to something not predictable,” can create for their teams that the same circumstances are something to be dealt with in the present… and, if looked at from a future-driven perspective, are inherently openings for new possibilities.

Second Shift – Create an Urgent Case for Action for your organization and its leadership.

Every organization has a default future, and a leader’s unique contribution is to make the default future impossible to ignore. If that future is undesirable or sub-optimal, make its consequences vivid: the lost opportunities, the erosion of value, the missed customer expectations – they are the slow decline that becomes irreversible. When people fully experience for themselves the real cost of inaction, the default future occurs as intolerable. In that moment, urgency and commitment arise.

Third Shift –  Declare a bold, desirable, and yet not predictable, future worth committing to.

One that would not happen without urgent action today. One that demands new thinking, new skills, and new levels of collaboration and coordinated action.

Not a goal. Not an ambition. A declaration.

The Declaration of Independence of the United States of America marks a break with the past and the commitment to a new beginning. A declaration has the power to align the Network of Conversations, connect all the dimensions that teams will be dealing with when creating a new reality. Declarations sharpen focus, inform choices, and bring consistency.

Fourth Shift – Lead future-based conversations that deliver the desired future: Four Steps

Declaring a future is not enough. Organizations must operate from it. Only when conversations are consistently informed by the future that was committed to does the declaration become reality. To do so, at every step of the journey, leaders must assess the nature of conversations inside their organization and ensure that they are sufficient and aligned with the envisioned future.

Assessing the nature of conversations is a critical practice for leaders and is expressed by four essential steps.

STEP 1 — Identify the Gap

Past-based language leads to a default, predictable future, and future-based language leads to a desired future. Leaders must begin by articulating the default predictable future and making it clearly unacceptable and yet unavoidable. Next, leaders take on generating a conversation that brings to reality the desired future.

The articulation of both types of conversations elicits the gap between the two, and the opportunity and its value to the organization becomes a tipping point for decision makers.

STEP 2 — Assess the current state of conversations

Look at recent leadership meetings, executive committee agendas, or strategic off-site events and evaluate how much time was spent in them. What percent of the time was spent in past-driven conversations? If most conversations were past-based, the organization will inevitably deliver an expression of the past.

A powerful tool for assessing the quality of the conversations in your organization is to ask three questions and rate your answers.

Question #1 Conversations for Long Term

Is the desired future declared and disseminated within the organization?

Question #2 Conversations for Mid Term

Are the existing plans and actions sufficient and informed by the declared future?

Question #3 Conversations for NOW

Does everyone in your organization share the same set of priorities and what needs to be done NOW?

Each question is designed to identify a specific type of conversation, and the chart below shows what becomes available.

STEP 3 — Identify the missing Future-Based Conversations
Ask a catalytic question: If the desired future of your organization were about to happen, what would you be talking about right now? The answer to this question unleashes the discovery of the future-based conversations that are missing, and that will uniquely require your leadership.

STEP 4 — Master keeping The Future alive
Continuously test every critical conversation and/or action by asking:

Is it necessary?

Is it relevant?

Is it sufficient?

When you answer “yes” to all three of them, it indicates that the quality of the conversation is a match for the creation of the desired future. However, if a single question is answered by a “no”, it is time to identify the conversation and/or action that is simultaneously considered as necessary, relevant, and sufficient for all three of them.

Forward, Not Back

When you shift the conversations from the past to the future, you move your organization from reacting to circumstances to creating the desirable future you chose and declared.

The fact is - there is no going back. In times of uncertainty, trying to restore what once worked is a trap. Real leadership emerges when you stop looking backward and start creating the future. The moment you and your team commit to a future that is desirable and yet not predictable, the transformation you’re out to create begins.

By Olga N. Loffredi, PhD

CEO - Vanto Group | Advisor to Corporate Boards | Guest Lecturer | Member of the Barbados Group

By Gregory C. Unruh, PhD

Arison Professor | MIT Sloan Guest Editor | Carbon Lock-in Originator | Author | Global Sustainability Expert

About Vanto Group

Vanto Group is a boutique performance consultancy that offers a full range of services from facilitating strategic planning sessions to building and coaching high-performance executive and management teams, to implementing large-scale initiatives. Named by Forbes as one of the World’s Best Management Consulting Firms in 2024 and 2025, (and one of America’s Best Management Consulting Firms in 2020, 2021, 2024, and 2025), Vanto Group is dedicated to creating unprecedented business results, tailoring its initiatives to the unique needs of its clients, with a specific focus on performance, agility, and the ability to maintain a competitive advantage. For further information, visit: www.vantogroup.com.

References

Three Laws of Performance: Rewriting the Future of Your Organization and Your Life -  Steve Zaffron and Dave Logan, 2009

Your Organization Is a Network of Conversations - Steve Zaffron and Gregory Unruh, MIT Sloan Management Review, July 2018

Sources

Encyclopedia Britannica, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), U.S. State Department (history site), and USDA classroom materials

The ideas in this article are drawn from the work of the consulting firm, Vanto Group, or, in some instances, the book, Three Laws of Performance, and are used with permission.