How to deal with uncertainty

Hello and welcome to Working It.

I was in France last week, visiting Deloitte’s brand-new Emea campus for staff leadership training. I am fascinated by the return to corporate-run “universities” 🎓. GE famously has its Crotonville campus (opened in 1956), but the idea fell out of fashion for a long time. Now it’s back, and with a post-pandemic focus on real-life connection. Watch out for our forthcoming Working It video on this topic.

I’d love to hear your experiences of corporate learning campuses, old and new: [email protected]. Here’s mine: as a junior editor in the 90s I went on management training at a stately home in Swindon, owned by my employer, Reader’s Digest. What do I remember? Swimming in the indoor pool, enjoying the free bar and doing the Myers-Briggs personality test. Great fun for a sociable ENFJ. Money well spent? 👀

Read on for an expert’s advice on how managers can get ready for years, or, likely, decades 😱, of workplace disruption.

Focus on certainty before you deal with the unknown 🙈

“We are in a tech supercycle and a geopolitical supercycle, and this is the slowest they will ever be in our lifetimes, which is terrifying if you think about it. And right now, AI is the slowest it will ever be.”

This startling statement about the state of the world comes from Terence Mauri, a leadership expert, founder and author of the forthcoming The Upside of Disruption. I enjoy Terence’s posts on LinkedIn, so I called him to ask: what is the upside of disruption? Because it all looks pretty scary. And how can managers and leaders embrace it 🤗?

Terence started by acknowledging how hard it is for humans to accept change: “We [as humans] crave certainty so much that sometimes we miss the upside of disruption, and what I mean by that is the opportunity to reimagine work — work that’s broken.” The prize for anyone who gets to the other side of disruption — and this, he stresses, goes for life events as well as those at work — is “the possibility that the best is still to come 🙌🏻”.

He says that the first step for anyone interested in re-framing their thinking about disruption (and no, I don’t just mean change related to AI 🥱), is, reassuringly, to think about what remains certain in your working life.

“That’s a really important point because we often forget to ask that question. What are we certain about in our careers? So I’m certain that if I focus on value, that’s going to create some kind of sustainable outcome. I’m certain that if I innovate, and iterate and adopt the spirit of curiosity and humility, then I am going to learn — and that’s a great antidote against disruption. And then the second thing is: what are the practical ways for managers to reduce uncertainty? One of them is asking questions.”

These questions should be about self-reflection — how can I do things differently — and also broader ideas, perhaps with the team’s input: “What’s emerging, what’s enduring and what’s eroding in the future of work?”

As well as talking about the impact of generative AI, Terence’s book runs through lots of other reasons why work keeps changing. These include talent scarcity — finding people with the right skills, and keeping them, is likely to be a huge challenge in future. Add to that the demands of new customers who want personalised products and services (by yesterday 💨) and disruption from start-ups and sector consolidation. It all makes for an uncomfortable future.

Terence’s method for embracing disruption — essentially, getting ahead of it and taking back some control — reminds me of the difference between the old approach to corporate careers, when we waited patiently to be promoted ⏳, and the newer tactics of creating our own opportunities, making sideways moves to acquire skills and focusing on “being visible”. It’s the difference between being reactive and proactive. Is this, perhaps, the secret of learning to love disruption?

It’s more than that, Terence suggests, and he says that we have to see the value in taking more risks. “I think the biggest takeaway [about managing disruption] is that we always overestimate the risk of trying new things but underestimate the risk of standing still🧍🏻‍♀️.”

So there you have it. Cast off the comfort blanket and embrace the chilly winds of change. Please share your own tips on how to make the best of uncertainty (asking for a friend, obviously) : [email protected].

This week on the Working It podcast

We all make mistakes, even though we like to pretend otherwise 😶‍🌫️. The recent CrowdStrike global IT outage seems to have been down to error. Most of us will never do something with such severe consequences, but the incident prompted an episode of the Working It podcast: how can we recover from our mistakes at work? And how do we regain trust?

First, I talk to Hugh Carnegy, the FT editor in charge of our corrections and clarifications. He has wise words on how individuals and their managers should deal with errors. And then Harvard Business School professor Sandra Sucher, a world expert on trust, offers her simple step-by-step guide on how to act after a messing up. Step one? Say sorry, properly 😔 — and then work out the type of harm you’ve done to others.

Five top stories from the world of work

1. Whistleblowing cases on the rise in the UK’s employment tribunal system: It’s extremely hard — and often career-destroying — to call out your employer for wrongdoing, but workers are increasingly taking their cases to tribunal. Josh Gabert-Doyon examines what’s behind the trend.

2. How executives approach work during holidays: Who doesn’t like a juicy examination of CEOs’ vacation habits? This article from Oliver Balch and Joshua Franklin does not disappoint. Plus, there are some great tips on how to create a clear chain of command when the boss gets much-needed off-grid time.

3. How we stopped caring about corporate twaddle: The long and undistinguished history of management-speak is not going anywhere, as Pilita Clark outlines in a very funny column. We all love to be part of the in-crowd, which is why this stuff is now endlessly tolerated (sadly).

4. The welfare state is writing too many people off too early: The UK has a vast number of economically inactive people, and research shows many of them want to work but can’t find enough support for their disability, or flexibility for their family circumstances. Camilla Cavendish outlines the problems and suggests some solutions.

5. Gamification: it’s like fun, but more hellish: Tim Harford examines the addictive ways in which our phones — and many other aspects of modern life keep us hooked. The real fun, he suggests, is in actual human connection.

One more thing . . . 

Ilona Maher is a US rugby sevens player, currently at the Olympics. She is also a massive TikTok star, with 1.9mn followers. Her videos are properly laugh-out-loud funny. With thanks to the Gen Z family members who introduced me to Ilona.

And finally . . . 

My friend and FT colleague Claer Barrett won the newsletter of the year prize at the Publisher Newsletter Awards last week, for her Sort Your Financial Life Out course. Claer has distilled six easy lessons on personal finance, delivered by email and free to FT subscribers. Sign up here.

Claer and I will be running a Work Therapy session at the FT Weekend Festival at Kenwood House in London on September 7, answering your questions about work, life, finance and anything else (go on, test us ✅). The festival has 10 stages running throughout the day, and speakers include the actors John Lithgow and Simon Russell Beale; Sharon White, chair of John Lewis, as well as well-known FT faces including editor Roula Khalaf and economics commentator Martin Wolf.

Get £24 off in-person festival tickets using discount code Newsletters24.