How Leaders Stay Oriented in Constant Volatility

Political, social, cultural, and technological volatility are now iterating faster than organizational structures can stabilize. Change is no longer episodic but continuous, compounding and often unresolved before leaders have time to reestablish context or trust.

Whether we’re navigating complexity inside an organization or repositioning across external ecosystems, one leadership struggle kept coming to the forefront in my conversation with Executive Coach & Master Trainer, Carrie Weaver. Connection.

When change accelerates without repair, it’s easy to lose orientation let alone connect with yourself or your surroundings. The familiar points of reference that once provided an anchor or tether are gone. Much like spatial disorientation - when an astronaut can no longer accurately perceive position, motion, or direction -professional disorientation happens when relational and contextual cues fall out of sync.

Who actually holds authority now?
How are decisions really being made?
Is this really a human or AI?
Where does trust live and with whom?

Mass layoffs sit beside record profits. Re-orgs quietly redistribute power and decision rights. AI accelerates efficiency while introducing new questions around legitimacy, value creation, and trust. The signals leaders are navigating no longer come reliably from formal structures - org charts, titles, decision processes, performance systems or what looks like legal documentation i.e. a passport that can now be AI-generated. They surface instead through human dynamics: trust, energy, behavior, and unspoken power shifts.

What surfaced again and again in our conversation was - in moments of sustained uncertainty, people search for connection - to themselves, to others, and to the systems they’re trying to navigate. When trust erodes or structures lag reality, orientation comes from how people relate - inwardly and outwardly - while the ground keeps moving underneath, above and around them.

Finding the bright, in this context, isn’t about control or mastering the maze. It’s about knowing which relationships, conversations, and environments help you stay oriented as the maze changes shape. And the work isn’t simply recalibration. It’s reconnection, whether navigating complexity inside an organization or repositioning across external ecosystems.

Connection to Self:
Clarity as Orientation

Before leaders can reconnect teams, organizations, or ecosystems, something more fundamental has to happen first: internal orientation and connection to self. Regaining internal reference points - the ability to know your own joy and strengths as well as your shortcomings, especially when pressure is high - becomes critical to how you want to show up in the world. Whether it’s to the board meeting that morning or to an interview with a new company. 

“In moments of uncertainty, complexity, volatility - go inward - who am I and how do I want to share my greatest gifts with the world?”

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As someone who has done countless journaling exercises and self-assessment tests, Carrie’s advice starts with something incredibly simple and actionable. 

Meditate. 

When leaders slow down enough to hear themselves think - reflection, stillness, creative expression, movement - not as wellness checkboxes, but as mechanisms for regulation, clarity emerges not only as cognitive output but physiologically, emotionally and energetically. 

This clarity leads to a self-awareness that can be enhanced by data and as a former geologist and scientist, Carrie identifies the right data set that will enable and enhance higher performance. Whether it’s the Hogan, Sparketype, Myers-Briggs, and the countless others in her toolkit, she is quick to extract and discern personality, motivation, reputation. Not to label or limit but to empower and elevate when making challenging decisions both in the office and out. Because when people are dysregulated - anxious, depleted, bracing for impact - the nervous system takes over. The brain shifts into protection mode. Problem-solving capacity narrows. Decision-making becomes defensive without realizing it.

I've been fortunate enough to benefit from Carrie’s sharp pattern recognition and ability to filter information quickly, as well as her skill in hearing the unspoken things when I was floating in space, disoriented and my mind couldn’t find a tether. From daily decisions of in-office team dynamics to preparing hard conversations to major career decisions, self-orientation has brought me back to feeling grounded in how I show up in that moment. 

“Self-awareness is the starting point but, awareness alone doesn’t create change — but without it, you can’t even begin.”

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And when all else fails, there’s one revealing question she uses that usually shifts the chaotic energy which is… 

“Tell me your secret wish.”

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Not as a goal. Not as a plan. But as a signal of a missing component. Community. Expression. Agency. A longing to feel like oneself again inside the work. That “wish” became an internal compass. Not something to act on directly, but something that revealed where energy had gone dormant, where fear had taken over, or where identity had become overly shaped by external systems. And boy, was my answer that I blurted out surprising when she prompted me. As she discerned the meaning between the letters and words, it has re-oriented me in a completely different professional and personal trajectory than what I would have ever conjured up myself.

“The purpose isn’t to do the thing. It’s to excavate what’s underneath — the missing spark, the unmet need.”

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Clarity, in this sense, wasn’t about reinvention. It was about reconnecting with myself. Through honest self-examination, through presence, through moments of joy or stillness, I regained the ability to interpret what’s happening around me without being consumed by it. I stopped grasping for certainty and started rebuilding orientation.

Only from that place does the next layer of connection become possible.

Connection to Others:
Why Proximity Rebuilds Trust When Structure Fails

Once internal orientation starts to return, we also know how to connect with others and ultimately who we want to connect with. In a climate of so much mistrust and uncertainty, seniors leaders are struggling to balance connection with breadth and depth. We’ve all seen when it goes left with a town hall or a company wide memo or when recruiters are faced with 2000 applications and simply cannot reply leaving applicants feeling hopeless. 

In periods of instability, organizations feel pressured to respond by scaling communication. More all-hands. More updates. More carefully worded messages designed to reassure large groups at once. Or automated responses to applying candidates. The intent is transparency and speed. The effect is often distance. And actually, as Carrie advises, this is a moment to get more intimate. Small-group conversations. One-on-ones. Informal check-ins where people can ask real questions without worrying about optics. These become the places where uncertainty gets processed instead of suppressed.

“Vulnerability doesn’t mean an emotional outburst. It can simply be saying, ‘This is hard. I don’t have all the answers. And I care.'”

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Mistrust doesn’t come from a lack of information. It comes from a lack of relationship.

When context is shifting faster than people can metabolize it, trust doesn’t build through broadcasts. It builds through proximity. Moments where people can feel each other thinking in real time. Where tone, hesitation, care, and uncertainty are legible again. Carrie coaches leaders to do something deceptively simple and deeply difficult: narrate your thinking.

“Narrate your thoughts from a place of vulnerability and honesty. 
I care about you, I want you to feel better, and I’m here as you are. How can I help you?  
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People want to feel close and leaders don’t know how to show up authentically. There’s a double-edged sword amongst people who are craving genuine human connection and a fear of doing that in a way that’s “wrong” because they may feel like they can’t make a cultural bridge, identity bridge, gender bridge and there’s so much sensitivity around human variations and people are afraid to make mistakes.”

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In those moments, what stabilizes teams is leaders willing to stay present inside uncertainty, to meet people where they are. Not to reassure, but to orient. There’s an important distinction here that emerged subtly but consistently: vulnerability isn’t disclosure for its own sake. It’s relational calibration. 

One key reminder from Carrie was that at the most extreme energetic level of panic and anxiety, the most helpful thing is acknowledgement and validation of their experience (rather than trying to manage their experience).

Connection at this layer isn’t about intensity, it’s where leaders begin to see what they can’t see alone. Patterns surface through relationship: who feels able to speak honestly, who has gone quiet, where friction is forming before it turns brittle. Feedback arrives not as critique, but as information. Not everyone needs the same message. But everyone needs a place where uncertainty can be metabolized together.

Only then does the work extend outward again - toward the systems, markets, and ecosystems leaders are navigating - without leaving people behind. We build confidence amidst chaos, build coherence even when surrounded by uncertainty and ultimately start to move together as a team, community, tribe tethered to each other for orientation.

Connection to the System:
Reorientation Without Control

After reconnecting inwardly and rebuilding relational proximity, leaders encounter a third and quieter challenge: how to relate to the system itself.

The system might be an organization mid–re-org, where reporting lines exist on paper but power has shifted elsewhere. It might be a market reshaped by AI, consolidation via mergers and acquisitions which are increasing in frequency, or capital flows that move faster than meaning can keep up. 

What’s changed today isn’t that systems evolve, they always have. I think what’s changed is the speed, frequency and layering of multiple systems changing at once. Systems (political, social, cultural) have become harder to read and trust and many leaders respond by tightening their grip. More control. Faster decisions. Clearer stances. Not because control works, but because disorientation is distracting.

So, something more helpful might be...

Instead of asking…
‍How do I orient inside this system?
‍A more stabilizing question might be…
‍How does this system interact with me, especially under pressure?

When leaders collapse their identity into the system, they lose leverage and every signal feels personal. Every shift feels existential. Reorientation begins by separating self from structure. Not in withdrawal, but in discernment. This is where internal clarity and relational awareness converge. Leaders who stay oriented are able to notice when they’re responding to the system reflexively rather than intentionally. For leaders navigating transitions - inside or outside organizations - the work isn’t to master the system. It’s to read it. To understand not just how it’s designed, but how it behaves under pressure and how you behave inside it.

“You have to understand who you become when you’re under stress—and then assess whether the system you’re entering will bring out your best or your worst.”

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I think a very visible systematic challenge that I see is the current digital hiring landscape. Mass lay-offs and A-Team talent out of work for over a year and struggling to get one interview. Internally, companies are facing imposter hires with one notable and frightening example from Carrie about a company who - through very sophisticated A.I. tools - mistakenly hired a North Korean under false pretenses. Externally, candidates are facing a 0.4% cut through of a job offer from an online application, most often never hearing a response from the company. This creates a vicious cycle of mistrust on both sides.  

Remote work significantly expands the potential candidate pool. What was once a local search limited to perhaps 200 candidates can now, especially for roles explicitly labelled as remote, encompass up to 2,000 potential applicants. Tools like LinkedIn have made applying a one-click process. A.I. has made resume and cover letter writing robotic and less human. 

In that context, trust no longer travels reliably through systems, it travels through people. 

“The most successful way to get hired today is through employee referrals. Someone who can truly vouch that the person who is applying is legit. What’s tricky about that is on the candidate side, they’re seeing these roles online knowing that they’re deeply qualified and hearing crickets. It’s really discouraging for candidates. So, it's all about finding real humans that you know in companies that you’d be delighted to work at. 1 in 12 or 1 in 15 informational interview conversations will yield an offer conversion. But, A.I. has made it more complex for both candidates and companies.”

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The lesson isn’t limited to hiring. When systems lose their ability to orient us, connection becomes the unit of trust. 

Across our conversation, the same structure kept repeating. Whether we were talking about leadership, teams, or career transitions:

• Connection to self restores internal reference points when external pressures distort judgment.
  
• Connection to others rebuilds trust when structure and scale fail to do so.
  
• Connection to the system allows leaders to stay in relationship with changing conditions without collapsing their identity into them.
  

This isn’t about controlling the system. And it isn’t about outrunning it. It’s about staying oriented while moving through it. Which is why the work inevitably turns practical. Because once orientation is reestablished - internally, relationally, systemically - the real question becomes:

Where has connection weakened, and how do I rebuild it deliberately?

Connection Audit: Rebuilding Orientation Through Connection

Orientation doesn’t come back all at once. It returns in layers and in a specific order.

The Connection Stack: Self → Others → System

If you try to repair them out of sequence, effort turns into friction.

1. To Reconnect with Self - Reclaim Internal Reference Points

Orientation prompts to distinguish reaction from choice:

• When pressure rises, what predictably changes in my behavior?
• What part of me is driving right now - fear, habit, or choice?
• Where do I feel grounded in my body today, even briefly?
  

Stabilizing actions: 

• Meditate: slow the nervous system before making directional decisions (meditation, movement, play, stillness).
• Assess: Use data (Hogan, Sparketype, Myers-Briggs) not to label yourself, but to surface stress patterns and blind spots.
• Ask yourself: “What is my secret wish and what unmet need is underneath it?”

2. To Reconnect with Others - Restore Human Signal

Orientation prompts to distinguish information from trust:

• Where am I broadcasting instead of sitting with?
• Who can speak honestly to me right now and who can’t?
• Have I narrated my thinking, or only delivered conclusions?

Stabilizing actions:

• Shift from scale to proximity: one-on-ones, small rooms, informal check-ins.
• Name uncertainty without dramatizing it: “This is hard. I don’t have all the answers. And I care.”
• Invite feedback not as critique, but as information: “Tell me when I’m missing something.”

3. To Reconnect to Systems - Discernment Without Control

Orientation prompts to distinguish motion from meaning:

• How does this system interact with me, especially under pressure?
• What behaviors does this environment reward?
• What goes quiet or unsafe here?
• Which of my strengths distort under sustained pressure?
• Who do I become in this system six months in?

Stabilizing actions:

• Treat systems as something to read, not master.
• Evaluate opportunities by interaction, not title or optics.
• Build legitimacy through people and ecosystems, not applications or abstractions.

In short…

When volatility strips away the usual landmarks, orientation doesn’t come from tighter control — it comes from connection. First to self, then to others, then to the systems you move through, so you can navigate constant change without losing your judgment, your relationships, or yourself.

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