Certain Uncertainty

14Staying in the Know in Extraordinary Times

Maja Korica

Environmental disasters, war, disease, and other extreme events. Rapidly changing industries and careers. New technologies. Work intensification. More connections. Less certainty. We live in highly fluid times—times that demand constant attempts at order, or at resilience, lest we are lost in their increasingly precarious tides.

We feel this increasingly, perilously unsteady world individually: self‐help books on personal resilience abound. We discuss and arbitrate it politically.

Implications for organizations matter too. Most notably, what does our present‐day systemic precariousness—what I call the fluid now—mean in terms of the skills that executives (and their staff) need to develop, and corporations should support?

A decade ago, my colleague Professor Davide Nicolini and I observed seven chief executives running major healthcare organizations in the UK. Their lives involved constant juggling of multiple issues with immediate, mid‐ and long‐term implications, complex lines of accountability, countless stakeholders (from patients and their loved ones to medical staff, local communities, ministers, and civil servants), and constantly shifting expectations. Amid that, we saw active efforts to keep up with the shifting tides around them, but also to “know the unknown”—remain attuned to major problems lurking just around the corner, before it was too late to do anything about them.¹

Such practices eventually became habit, ...