To Lead Through Uncertainty, Unlearn Your Assumptions – Executive Summary
HBR, by Annie Peshkam, published February 2026
1. Summary
"To Lead Through Uncertainty, Unlearn Your Assumptions" (HBR, 2026) argues that traditional leadership competence, built on strategy, execution, and control, reaches its limit in complex environments, and that what leaders need instead is inner steadiness paired with shared sensemaking. The article makes the case that this capacity comes from unlearning old assumptions, particularly the beliefs that speed signals strength, that reassurance equals care, and that absorbing pressure is a mark of good leadership. The article points to concrete practical shifts leaders can make, including taking reflective pauses before reacting, naming difficulty openly rather than masking it, sharing uncertainty with the team instead of shielding them from it, and staying with tension long enough to understand it rather than resolving it prematurely.
2. Relevance for CIOs
For CIOs, this reframes leadership under pressure as building shared capacity across the team. Resisting the instinct to project false confidence in meetings and instead naming what is difficult invites the team into problem solving. Redistributing the weight of AI transformation pressure by assigning team members to track and report on real-world impact signals turns sensemaking into a shared task. Finally, auditing personal leadership reflexes, such as equating speed with decisiveness or calm with strength, helps CIOs catch the habits that can weaken trust over time.
3. Thoughts from Sonny Claussen (CEO Bee360) about this Article
Sonny notes that leaders get promoted for competence, but in complex environments it is capacity (the ability to stay present when action won't resolve the tension) that matters most, and that capacity grows by letting go of old assumptions. Sonny feels this daily. The willingness to question established structures and try new approaches has never been greater, and he points to his own shift with AI-assisted presentation design as a concrete example: Design has been commoditized, so producing visually strong slides is no longer impressive on its own. What matters now is whether the storyline holds together and resonates with clients. He has stopped checking footnotes and started asking whether the thinking behind the work is sharp.