How organizations decide and act when the situation is uncertain.
A Field Guide for Decision Makers, published in Business Review in five parts to fit the magazine’s length. It builds on the field guide “Managing complexity (and chaos) in times of crisis”, by Dave Snowden and Alessandro Rancati, European Commission Joint Research Centre, 2021.
https://business-review.eu/br-exclusive/a-field-guide-for-decision-makers
Most crisis plans are written for one kind of problem and meet another. The chapter explains how to tell which kind of situation you are in, and why the capacity to adapt matters more than the plan once reality stops fitting it.
In a crisis, decisions get pulled up the hierarchy and slow down. The piece argues for distributing decisions while keeping coordination central, and for using different forms of control in different parts of the same crisis.
Between adapting and inventing, pause and map what is actually happening. It uses exaptation, giving something existing a new use, as the idea for finding value in what the crisis produced.
Getting back to normal can mean throwing away what the crisis just taught. The piece asks which emergency fixes deserve to stay, how fast to relax the rest, and how to turn lessons into rehearsed capability.
Republica, 5 October 2026 (in Romanian).
Two common ways of talking about change: it all depends on the individual, or nothing the individual does matters. The article looks at the space between them, using the idea of posture from martial arts, and introduces “wayshaping”: finding the room to move that exists in a situation, however small, and working from it.
https://republica.ro/capcana-lui-ztotul-depinde-de-tine-si-capcana-lui-znu-pot-face-nimic
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Wayshaping, a term from recent work in applied complexity (James, Jamaluddin, Froese and colleagues, including Dave Snowden, 2025), used here for how an executive team finds room to move inside its constraints.