You Don’t Have to Predict What’s Next to Make Progress
Why financial services leaders need clarity about what stays fixed—and flexibility about what changes.
Financial services leaders have always operated with uncertainty. What feels different now is the number of forces changing at the same time and the speed at which those forces can affect one another. Economic volatility, geopolitical instability, cybersecurity threats, artificial intelligence, digital assets, regulatory change, nonbank competitors, and increasingly interconnected financial systems are making the operating environment more difficult to predict.
McKinsey reports that the World Uncertainty Index reached a level in the third quarter of 2025 nearly nine times higher than it had been 20 years earlier. At the same time, risks that financial institutions once may have managed separately are becoming increasingly connected. Geopolitical developments can affect markets, supply chains, cyber threats, regulation, and capital flows simultaneously, while advances in technology can create new opportunities and new vulnerabilities at nearly the same speed.
For leaders, the instinct may be to respond by trying to improve the forecast: gather more information, model more scenarios, and anticipate what comes next. Those capabilities matter, but there is a limit to how much uncertainty can be predicted away. The more useful leadership question may be different: How does an organization continue making progress when it cannot know exactly what happens next?
Uncertainty Changes the Playbook
The challenge is not simply that conditions are changing. It is that several important conditions can change at once.
WTW’s 2026 outlook for financial institutions describes an increasingly interconnected risk environment encompassing geopolitical uncertainty, cybersecurity, AI, fraud, digital assets, economic volatility, regulation, third-party dependencies, and M&A. Cyber risk, for example, is no longer treated solely as an IT concern because a cyber event can quickly become an operational, financial, regulatory, and reputational problem. M&A can similarly introduce overlapping challenges involving systems, culture, cyber exposure, people, and operational resilience.
That kind of environment makes a rigid strategy increasingly difficult to defend. A Playbook built for one competitive, economic, technological, or regulatory environment may need to change when the environment does.
But constant change creates its own risk. If leaders respond to every new development by changing direction, organizations can lose clarity about what they are actually trying to accomplish. Teams become reactive, priorities multiply, and activity begins to replace progress.
The leadership challenge is therefore not simply becoming more flexible. It is understanding what should remain fixed and what should be allowed to change.
The Target Provides Stability
Walter Bond’s Make Progress framework separates the Target from the Playbook for an important reason.
The Target defines the result the organization is trying to produce. The Playbook defines how it intends to produce that result. When those two things become confused, leaders can become so committed to an existing strategy that they resist necessary change—or so responsive to changing conditions that the organization continually moves the destination.
In financial services, a Target might involve sustainable growth, stronger client relationships, greater productivity, increased market share, improved customer outcomes, or long-term enterprise value. The specific Target will differ by organization, but its purpose is the same: it gives people a clear definition of progress against which decisions can be evaluated.
That clarity becomes more important, not less, when conditions are uncertain. When a new technology emerges, a competitor changes the market, economic conditions shift, or a new risk appears, leaders have something against which to evaluate their response: Does this require us to change where we’re going, or does it require us to change how we’re getting there?
Those are very different decisions.
Scenario Planning Should Create Options, Not Certainty
Financial leaders are already responding to uncertainty by changing how they plan. Deloitte’s 2026 Finance Trends research found that economic uncertainty was the leading operational and macroeconomic risk among surveyed finance leaders. In response, 30% reported using advanced scenario planning, while 28% were adopting more agile governance models designed to enable faster decision-making. Deloitte also found that 57% of finance leaders now play a leading role in shaping enterprise strategy.
Scenario planning is valuable precisely because it acknowledges that there may not be one predictable future. Instead of committing the organization to a single assumption about what happens next, leaders can consider several plausible conditions and determine how the organization might respond to each.
The goal should not be to create the perfect forecast. It should be to create decision readiness.
If interest rates move differently than expected, what changes? If a new competitor enters the market, what changes? If AI materially alters the economics of a process, what changes? If regulation shifts, what changes? And equally important: what does not change?
Organizations that have already answered those questions can respond deliberately rather than improvising every time the environment moves
Adaptability Is Not the Same as Indecision
McKinsey argues that adaptability is becoming imperative for financial institutions, but it also makes an important distinction: effective adaptation is often evolutionary rather than revolutionary. Institutions still need foundational principles and capabilities even as they update how they identify, assess, and respond to emerging risks.
Walter describes a similar leadership discipline as adaptability with conviction.
The conviction is about the result. The adaptability is about the route.
In Walter’s teaching, there is a meaningful difference between quitting and adjusting: quitting changes the destination, while adjusting changes the route. He describes effective leaders as staying firm about the what while remaining creative and flexible about the how.
That distinction is especially useful in an industry where leaders may feel pressure to respond quickly to every emerging technology, competitor, risk, or marketplace shift. Flexibility does not require abandoning the strategy every quarter, nor does conviction require continuing with a Playbook after the environment has shown that it no longer works.
Strong leadership requires knowing the difference.
The Roster Needs Clarity When Conditions Change
A flexible Playbook also places different demands on the people responsible for executing it. If leaders understand why a strategy is changing but the rest of the organization does not, adaptability can feel like inconsistency.
That is where the Roster matters.
People need enough clarity about the Target to understand why the Playbook is changing. They need to know which priorities remain important, what their responsibilities are, how decisions will be made, and what successful execution looks like under the new conditions. Without that context, frequent adjustments can create confusion, competing interpretations, and stalled execution.
This is one reason adaptability is not solely a strategic capability. It is an organizational one. Leaders may make the decision to change the Playbook, but the Roster ultimately determines whether the organization can execute the change without losing momentum.
Progress Doesn’t Require Perfect Visibility
The financial-services environment is unlikely to become easier to predict. Technology will continue evolving, geopolitical conditions will change, new competitors will emerge, regulation will respond, and risks that once appeared separate will increasingly interact.
Organizations cannot control all of those conditions, and leaders will not correctly anticipate every one of them. Making progress cannot depend on doing so.
What leaders can control is whether their organization has enough clarity to distinguish the destination from the route. A clear Target provides direction. An adaptable Playbook allows the organization to respond when circumstances change. An aligned Roster makes those adjustments executable.
TARGET → PLAYBOOK → ROSTER → PROGRESS
The strongest organizations may not be the ones that predict the future most accurately. They may be the ones that know what they are unwilling to lose sight of—and what they are willing to change to get there.
Ready to Make Progress?
Walter Bond works with financial services leaders and organizations to strengthen clarity, alignment, leadership, and execution—helping teams remain focused on the Target while adapting their Playbook as conditions change.