How to Lead When Control Is Mostly An Illusion

There is a particular look leaders get at the moment.

It is not the “busy but energised” look you see on conference stages. It is the exhausted, slightly glazed expression of someone who has been rewriting the same roadmap for the fourth time this quarter, trying to keep up with AI announcements, cost pressures, restructures, geopolitics, and the creeping fear that they are supposed to have answers to questions that nobody on earth can reliably answer.

That is the world the recent Harvard Business Review piece How to Lead When Things Feel Increasingly Out of Control speaks to. The article describes leaders trying to firefight AI-driven change, restructure their organisations, and keep teams calm, all while feeling like the floor is moving under their own feet. It argues that the real leadership job now is protecting imagination, morale, and momentum in the middle of all that noise.

This piece is my own take, sparked by that HBR article, on how to lead when control is slipping out of your hands. Or, more accurately, when you finally realise it was never really in your hands to begin with.

The leadership model that quietly broke

For most of the last few decades, the default leadership model went something like this:

• Set a direction.

• Build a plan.

• Get buy-in.

• Execute the plan.

The implicit promise to your team was: “I more or less know what is going on. Follow me.”

That model was shaky already. AI has just ripped the facade off. You cannot keep a straight face while promising a stable three-year plan when:

• Regulatory signals are shifting every quarter.

• Vendors are releasing new AI capabilities faster than you can run governance reviews.

• Your board is pulling you in three directions at once: “Cut costs, innovate faster, and be safe.”

The old script quietly breaks down, but the social expectations stay. People still look at you and ask, “What is the plan?”

So leaders overcompensate. They double down on control: more status calls, more dashboards, more “you must get sign-off from X before changing Y.” Ironically, this can crush exactly what you need most in an AI-saturated world: local judgement, creativity, and honest information about what is actually happening.

If control is mostly an illusion, what is left?

The answer, I think, is to shift from control to conditions.

Your job is less “steer the ship with perfect information” and more “shape the water the ship is sailing in.”

The HBR article frames this as preserving imagination, morale, and momentum when the outside world feels chaotic.

Imagination, morale, & momentum

On the surface, your organisation has objectives, OKRs, and roadmaps.

Under the surface, three deeper forces actually determine how you move in uncertain times:

1. Imagination – can people still think beyond the next email.

2. Morale – do people feel they have a future here, or are they quietly detaching.

3. Momentum – are you learning forward, or running in circles.

When things feel out of control, these three are usually what is eroding. You see it in small ways:

• Teams stop suggesting experiments and only ask “What do you want us to do”.

• Meetings become status updates rather than decision rooms.

• People cling harder to their patch, because they do not know what will happen to them.

The temptation is to respond with more detail, more slides, more “clarity”. The harder (and better) move is to accept a different role: not as the person who has the answers, but as the person who designs the environment where answers can emerge.

Here is a practical way to do that, building on the same spirit as the HBR piece but translated into something you can actually try with your team.

Five moves for leaders when things are out of control

None of them give you control over the world. But all of them give you more influence over how your people move inside it.

1. Shrink the horizon without shrinking the ambition

When uncertainty spikes, leaders often pick one of two bad options:

• Pretend the three-year plan is solid, just to look decisive.

• Refuse to commit to anything beyond a few weeks, which feels aimless and draining.

There is a healthier middle ground.

Keep the ambition big and vivid. Make the time horizon small and negotiable.

For example:

• Hold a clear, human description of where you are trying to get to over 2–3 years. Not a Gantt chart. A story. “We want to be the place customers trust to solve X in a world where AI is doing Y.”

• Run in 90-day strategic cycles that you treat as working hypotheses, not commandments. Each cycle:

  • What are the 3-5 bets we are making.

  • What would “we were right” look like.

  • What evidence will we accept that says we are wrong.

You are quietly changing the script from “I have a masterplan” to “We have a direction and a disciplined way to change course”.

That takes pressure off you, gives your team a stable enough frame to act, and creates a cadence of review that fits the speed of AI change.

2. Name the fear, not just the strategy

The HBR article opens with a leader who simply cannot carry it all any more: relentless AI change, restructuring, and a direct report asking if they will still have a job.

That is not a hypothetical scenario. Versions of that conversation are happening every week.

Most leaders in that moment do something completely understandable: they dodge. “Let us not get ahead of ourselves.”“We do not know that yet, focus on what we can control.”

The problem is that people are not fooled. They can feel the gap between what you are willing to say and what you actually know.

A better move is to name the fear and the limits of your knowledge out loud.

Something like:

“I cannot promise that roles will not change. Some probably will. What I can promise is that we will be transparent as decisions are made, we will treat people with respect, and we will not ask you to pretend this is easy.”

You are not catastrophising. You are refusing to collude with the fantasy that everything is fine.

This does three useful things:

• Lowers the emotional temperature. It is harder for rumours to spiral when you are already speaking plainly.

• Models how to talk about hard things without sugar-coating.

• Builds trust that when you can give clarity, you will.

Psychological safety does not mean “protecting people from bad news”. It means not making them carry it alone.

3. Draw a bright line between experiments and identity

When things feel chaotic, people stop experimenting because the costs feel too high.

If an experiment fails in stable times, it is just a learning moment. If an experiment fails when jobs feel at risk, it feels like evidence that you are expendable.

So the system nudges everyone towards risk aversion, right when you need exploration.

Your job as a leader is to decouple experiments from personal identity and status.

Practically, that looks like:

• Explicitly ringfencing experiments. “This initiative is a test. The goal is learning. Your performance review will look at how you learned and shared, not whether this specific idea turned into a blockbuster.”

• Rewarding people who shut down their own experiments when the data is bad, rather than dragging them on to save face.

• Sharing your own failed calls openly: “Here is a bet I sponsored that did not work and what I am taking from it.”

You are trying to move the culture from “I must be right” to “We are trying to get less wrong, faster.”

In an environment where no one really knows the answer, this is not soft. It is the only serious option left.

4. Protect imagination time like you protect cash

One of the most striking phrases in the HBR listing is the focus on preserving imagination alongside morale and momentum.

Imagination sounds fluffy. It is not.

In AI-heavy environments, imagination is a hard asset. The models are plentiful. The differentiator is your ability to imagine useful questions, new combinations, different ways to serve customers.

The problem is that imagination time is exactly what gets squeezed out when everything feels out of control:

• Calendars fill with check-ins and progress reviews.

• Nobody has time to gain perspective.

• The only thinking that happens is reactive.

So you have to get uncomfortably deliberate.

Some practical moves:

• Block “no meeting” windows for your leadership team and actually hold the line. Use them to work on the system, not just in the system.

• Run short, structured imagination sessions with your teams. For example, once a month: “If a new startup launched tomorrow using the same AI tools we have, how would they attack our business, and what could we do first.”

• Invite unlikely voices into those conversations: frontline staff, sceptics, the person who always sees the risks others ignore.

You want to make it very obvious, through your calendar and rituals, that thinking is not something you do after the work. Thinking is the work.

5. Build small, honest momentum loops

When everything is changing fast, “momentum” can become a story you tell yourself rather than something you feel. A large transformation programme can be 18 months into its life and still feel like nothing has really changed day to day.

To keep people going through genuine uncertainty, you need short feedback loops that tell them their effort is doing something, even if the bigger picture is still foggy.

A few ideas:

• Weekly “evidence of progress”. At the end of the week, ask teams to send one concrete sign that something moved in the right direction. A friction point removed. A metric nudged. A customer comment.

• Before / After storytelling. When a small change lands, do not just announce it. Tell the “before” story, show the “after” and name the people who made it happen.

• Tiny retrospective habit. Every two weeks, half an hour: “What did we learn. What should we stop. What should we do more of.” Not a big post-mortem. A little steering correction.

The point is not to manufacture fake positivity. It is to give people a felt sense that, despite the chaos, there is movement and learning.

Momentum is rarely one big push. It is thousands of small, honest signals that today is not identical to yesterday.

What this means for you, sitting in the middle

If you strip it right back, the new leadership job looks something like this:

• Accept that control, in the old sense, has gone. The world is too complex, too fast, and too entangled with AI and geopolitics for anyone to “have it” in the way we used to pretend.

• Protect the underground currents in your organisation: imagination, morale, momentum. The are what really matters now.

• Design your leadership practice around small, repeatable moves that shape those currents: shorter horizons, honest conversations, ringfenced experiments, protected thinking time, simple momentum loops.

The HBR article brings a useful lens: leaders are not just making decisions. They are stewards of human energy in environments that feel increasingly chaotic.

You do not need to have perfect answers.

You do need to make it safer for your people to admit they do not, to keep imagining when everything feels squeezed, and to keep taking the next small step when the path is not clear.

Control was always the visible tip of the iceberg. The real work of leadership sits below the waterline, where fear, imagination, and human momentum live.

That is where your attention belongs now.