The role of leadership in all of this is deceptively simple—and incredibly hard: stay calm in the chaos and give your team the tools to navigate it confidently.

As we wrap up annual performance reviews and lean into our ambitions for this year, I’ve found myself reflecting on how the teams I work with are doing and what contributes to their success and growth. We have been operating in an environment defined by constant change: rapid technology shifts, regulatory churn, market disruption, leadership transitions, process redesigns, and persistent talent movement.

A couple of years ago, the weight of that volatility was showing on one of those teams. They felt disempowered, and their frustration was palpable. Their old coping strategy—just push through until things calm down—was quietly setting them up to fail. Because the truth was obvious, even if uncomfortable: things weren’t going to calm down. With AI accelerating technical change, political and regulatory uncertainty introducing new requirements, and tech turnover hovering north of 13% annually, volatility wasn’t a phase; it was the core tenet of their operating environment. And most of the other teams we have studied are in the same situation.

So, I started trying to understand how best to turn things around. The team had grit, they were willing to put their heads down and power through the hard stuff. They were also resilient, taking setbacks well, and, like Rocky Balboa, when they got knocked down, they got right back up. But like Rocky, they were starting to get a bit battered and bruised. The repeated hits were taking their toll. What they needed was to be more like world-class surfers, who embraced the waves as their partner in the sport and consistently focused on the skills required to use them to improve their performance.

But how? How could this team, which viewed change in a traditional way, become surfers?

Surprisingly, the US Navy had a model for architecting the transformation that this team, and many others like them, need in these chaotic times. The Navy calls it Get Real Get Better (GRGB), and while we didn’t adopt all of the specifics, we certainly borrowed their principles. The first principle, Get Real, encourages everyone to openly embrace and acknowledge the reality and uncomfortable truths of their situation (warts, mistakes, and all). The second principle, Get Better, creates shared ownership and a single-minded focus on improving performance. Get Real Get Better became a mantra and a jumping-off point for their transformation, enabling them to stop cursing their VUCA reality and instead use it to fuel their success.

GET REAL

“Getting real” was the most critical—and hardest—shift to make.

Without realizing it, the team was clinging to wishful thinking. Their mental model still resembled Kotter’s three stages of change taught in every business school: Unfreeze (get ready), Change (implement new ways of working), Refreeze (settle into a new steady state). But embedded in that model is the assumption that every change has a beginning, middle, and end. It assumes that change is a focused activity that happens sporadically, much like a home renovation project. It is a brief period during which there is upheaval, at the end of which you get a new (and better) reality. It assumes that most of your time at work will be “frozen” in a set way of working.

But such a world no longer exists.

Change today is less like a home renovation project and more like the waves at the ocean. The waves never stop. Rather than waiting for still water to swim in, you learn to surf. Stability doesn’t come from lack of turbulence; it comes from understanding the rhythm of movement.

Once they accepted that reality, everything shifted. The goal was no longer to “get back to normal,” but to get better at rolling with the unexpected as they navigated it.

It turned out that I had some great perspectives for them based on my own experiences raising children while moving from country to country. That experience navigating uncertainty without being overwhelmed or frustrated by it, and preparing others for it, was exactly the leadership skills they needed. Let me explain.

When I moved to a new country with my children, we rarely spoke the language and had no firsthand experience of how things worked. This led to many surprises and unexpected situations. Most of our fellow expatriates expected a short period of adjustment before they learned “enough” to recreate the old stability they had in their home country. For them, every surprise became a frustration – an unpleasant deviation from their expected and hoped-for reality. They never learned to appreciate the newness or the differences; they just wanted to recreate their home-country experiences in their new location. They were looking for stability and “flat water” to swim in while they lived overseas. Surprises were bugs in the programming of life, and they found ways to adjust the situation to remove them.

Others, like me, accepted upfront that outcomes would be inconsistent, unfamiliar, and surprising—and leaned into the experience. We learned as we went. For my family, surprises weren’t setbacks; they were part of the experience. We enjoyed them – laughing at ourselves and appreciating the newness of it. The surprises (and waves) were features, not bugs, and we embraced them.

That distinction mattered for us. Once we truly got real, surprises stopped feeling like failures. They became data. We found them interesting and fun rather than unpleasant.

GET BETTER

Accepting reality gave the team something unexpected: stability.

If they could count on anything, it was that waves were coming—and that freed them to focus on becoming better surfers. The problem was that they hadn’t been practicing surfing. They’d been waiting for solid ground.

“Getting better” required ownership, ingenuity, and a willingness to rethink how they worked together. The skills that had served them well before were no longer enough.

They started by solving problems. Titles mattered less. Seniority mattered less. They flipped the org structure on its head and checked their assumptions at the door. No one had the full answer. They had to get to the root causes, leverage our networks, build new skills, and craft solutions together.

Before anything else, they anchored themselves in the idea of “saying yes to the mess,” (courtesy of Frank Barrett’s Say Yes to the Mess). Work doesn’t follow a clean score—it’s improvisational. Like a jazz ensemble, they must listen, respond, build on each other’s ideas, and stay grounded in purpose while adapting in real time. That mindset made it safer to experiment, to borrow ideas from unexpected places, and to test solutions without fear of failure.

Over time, they also became more intentional about learning. They stopped trying to be a certainty engine and started acting like a learning system. They surfaced assumptions early, tested them quickly, and treated missed targets as feedback—not failure. Learning became continuous, not episodic. And they looked for ways to make it contagious – spreading what they learned as far and as fast as they could. They talked about it during team meetings, shared it with other departments, and discussed it across networks.

To make it stick, they paired adaptability with discipline. They took a 4S approach (simplify, streamline, standardize, and synchronize) to refine their working routines. It helped them focus on what truly mattered, reduced friction in how insights flowed, standardized repeatable work, and aligned their efforts tightly to decision cycles. Performance plateaus stopped being sources of frustration and became signals to adjust their plans or approach. Small gains compounded. Confidence grew. And results steadily improved.

Riding the waves

The role of leadership in all of this is deceptively simple—and incredibly hard: stay calm in the chaos and give your team the tools to navigate it confidently.

Leaders who do this well typically anchor on two questions:

1. What if we embraced the turbulence?
What if uncertainty is a feature, not a bug? What if constraints aren’t curses, but catalysts? When we adopt an abundance mindset, challenges stop shrinking our thinking and start expanding it.

2. What if we solved this together—differently?
If no one has the answer, then any one of us might have part of it. The smartest person in the room can change moment by moment. Progress comes from collective intelligence, not individual heroics.

That shift—from resisting chaos to working with it— changes how teams perform. It helps them build capability in motion rather than waiting for the scarce moments of calm.

You will find more information about the concepts described here, in our book The Intentional Executive.

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