Manage uncertainty with a little help from your friends

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In 2025, economic uncertainty hit a new high. Between volatile world leaders, a changing climate, and rapidly evolving technology, the world is moving quickly, and there isn’t necessarily a map to help navigate it.

For managers, this is a difficult spot. Their job is to make decisions that will help them meet their organisational goals while protecting their workers. But sometimes, the tools they’ve acquired in their career aren’t sufficient for the challenge at hand, and there’s no professional development course that will cover the unique situation they’re now dealing with.

That’s why Professor Henry Mintzberg, a renowned management scholar at the Desautels Faculty of Management, and his PhD student Hanieh Mohammadi want managers to adopt new self-learning strategies.

“Situations always change, especially right now with all these disruptions happening around the world,” said Mohammadi on the Delve podcast. “More than ever, we need to be able to self-reflect and self-learn as a manager.”

For her, this means allowing our full selves into the workplace and tapping into our unique experiences and intuition to help decision-making. It also means exchanging ideas with our peers and tapping into their perspectives for help.

Looking inwards to look outwards

Mohammadi recently published a module in Mintzberg’s Coaching Ourselves self-learning platform. In it, she describes how strategic information can be found in many areas of our lives through adaptive identities.

Adaptive identities refer to the multiple roles people play in their lives and how they show up at work. A single worker might be a manager, data scientist, and an advisory committee member all at once. And outside the office, they could be a parent, friend, voter, or member of a marginalised group. Each of these identities, inside and outside the workplace, is linked to a unique set of experiences that inform how they interpret the world.

Adaptive identities mean everyone has unique perspectives to bring to the workplace. A manager who is also a parent might detect when her organisation is failing to provide adequate support to new mothers, resulting in high turnover rates among women and missed DEI goals, signalling a need for a course correction.

But all of this hinges on being allowed to express our multiple selves in the workplace, which isn’t always possible. Employees from marginalised groups, for example, often associate cultural identity expression with professional risk, so they downplay those parts of themselves at work. This not only hampers inclusion efforts but also removes sources of feedback for strategic decision-making.

“If we don’t have adaptive identities and the means to play them, we lose signals,” said Mohammadi.

With a little help from your friends

Mohammadi and Mintzberg explain that, through the exchange of ideas with trusted colleagues, managers can learn from the diverse identities and experiences of the other people in their network.

“Opening things up to their ideas and brainstorming, that’s peer-learning,” said Mintzberg.

Peer learning can take many forms, he said. It can be a roundtable with colleagues you work with regularly, a discussion with your counterparts at similar organisations, a call to your mentor, or a meet-and-greet with professionals from across disciplines. Each of these exchanges is an opportunity to learn from the experiences and worldviews of others.

And these kinds of exchanges can be crucial to navigating uncertainty. Through interactions with trusted peers, managers can stay on the bleeding edge, expanding their knowledge based on the real-world experiences of others.

“Learning has to be grounded in real, tangible events,” said Mintzberg. “Not abstractions, not reports, not generalities, not statistics, but specific experiences.”

Professor Henry Mintzberg and Hanieh Mohammadi offer more insights on peer learning and managing uncertainty on the Delve podcast. Search “McGill Delve” in your favourite podcast player.