Cathy Mauzaize is President, Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) at ServiceNow, leading the company’s second-largest geographic region.
The term VUCA—describing volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity—was coined in the late 1980s, describing the challenge of the period after the Cold War.
Today, VUCA is very much the norm. In fact, recent research by McKinsey shows that measures of global uncertainty are nearly double what they stood at in the mid-1990s. Geopolitical shifts, reconfigured supply chains, tighter cost environments and the rapid acceleration of AI have made VUCA a permanent operating condition.
The business leaders I meet have largely stopped asking when things will stabilize. The more useful question is whether their organizations are built to function without stability at all.
The traditional understanding of resilience assumes stability is the baseline: Absorb a shock, return to normal. But when that baseline becomes a moving target, the notion of resilience takes on a whole new meaning.
Today, resilience is the ability to keep moving with direction and control while everything around you is in motion. Yet, according to the World Economic Forum (WEF) and McKinsey, 84% of companies feel underprepared for current and future disruptions.
What most organizations miss is this: They carry structural weaknesses they don’t see until pressure makes them impossible to ignore. Those weaknesses are not hidden flaws. They are cracks that appear across systems, processes and culture that appear when organizations designed for stability encounter permanent uncertainty.
Where Organizations Actually Break
In conversations with business leaders across EMEA, I hear about the same problem: a lack of operational control. Organizations know where they want to go, but what breaks is the machinery of getting there.
Three blockers commonly come up.
The first is having clarity around decision ownership and direction. In many organizations, decisions slow because ownership is unclear, and escalation becomes the default response to ambiguity.
According to the WEF report cited above, only 42% of employees feel empowered to make decisions without micromanagement. Organizations tend to centralize decision-making in times of crisis, concentrating authority at the top. That instinct is understandable, but it leads to decisions moving further away from work, and speed is lost exactly when it matters most.
The second is execution flow. Work slows not because people lack capability, but because the system imposes friction. Information is fragmented, context is rebuilt at every step and workflows break across disconnected tools.
As organizations introduce more advanced AI, fragmented environments become harder to ignore. These systems depend on strong data quality, connected workflows and governance. Without those foundations, execution cannot scale, and control becomes harder to maintain—at any level—under pressure.
Finally, there is cultural responsiveness. Sustained pressure reshapes how people operate over time. Teams grow more cautious, gravitating toward what has worked rather than what could work, optimizing for local certainty rather than collective progress.
Gallup’s 2026 State of the Global Workplace report found global employee engagement declining for a second year (download required) to its lowest level since 2020. Organizations may continue to move, but do so with less initiative, less coordination and less shared direction.
These issues reinforce each other: decisions slow, execution happens in silos and behaviors adjust to that reality. Uncertainty exposes these gaps and amplifies them.
Building For Permanent Disruption
A few weeks ago, a leader I spoke with described the shift plainly. As pressures intensified, they realized the real bottleneck was internal: “Everything suddenly required approval.”
That is the paradox many organizations face: In trying to regain control, they make themselves harder to control. The response requires a different instinct. Leaders need to be clear and consistent about processes and where decisions belong to ensure work can move without constant reconstruction of context.
Start by mapping where decisions actually get made, versus where they are supposed to get made. That applies to your AI systems as much as your people. The gap can reveal which breakdown is doing the most damage. If decisions pile up in approval layers, the fix is often clarity about who decides what, rather than exerting more control.
If capable people produce slow results, the issue is not motivation, but friction. Find the steps that add little to no value, and remove them.
If people go through the motions without initiative, the issue is not engagement, but example. Leaders need to show up and model the behavior they want to see, as this clarifies what is possible.
Stop treating these issues as problems to solve, and start treating them as permanent design conditions. Be clear about who decides the default architecture; design friction out of every system from the start; and model visible leadership behavior as the operating standard, not the aspiration.
When disruption was temporary, resilience could be treated as a response. Today, it has to be built into how the organization operates every day, shaping how decisions are made, how work moves and how teams act as conditions keep changing.
For leaders operating in a constant state of VUCA, designing for resilience must be an intentional and ongoing effort across the organization.
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