Guardrails, Not Maps: How to Design Strategy for Uncertainty

In times of high volatility, most strategy playbooks fall apart. Five-year plans collapse under the weight of uncertainty, and leadership teams risk swinging between paralysis and overreaction.

To understand how strategy leaders can design for resilience without losing focus, we spoke with Andrea Hoymann, Head of Strategy at Brand chemistry. In this candid Q&A, Andrea shares how she structures planning horizons, keeps teams aligned, and uses disruption as a catalyst for reinvention. 1. What does strategic planning look like when the future is so unpredictable? It looks less like a five-year plan carved in stone and more like navigation by compass. In my experience, the organisations that struggle most in volatility are the ones still clinging to traditional planning cycles and objectives that become obsolete before the ink dries.

Instead, we’ve shifted to horizon planning for ourselves and our clients. We set and maintain a clear North Star of where we want to be, but treat everything between here and there as a hypothesis rather than certainty. We set 90-day sprints with specific experiments to test our assumptions, then use those learnings to inform the next sprint. It’s borrowed from agile development, but applied to strategy.

2. How do you balance the need for clear direction with flexibility to adapt fast? This is where most leadership teams tie themselves in knots. They either become paralysed by options or they pivot so frequently that the organisation gets whiplash. Neither works.

I think of it like setting up guardrails on a winding mountain road. The guardrails – your core values, your fundamental value proposition, your key capabilities – these stay firm. But within those boundaries, teams need the autonomy to navigate the curves as they see them.

3. What signals or indicators do you look for to decide when a strategy needs to shift? I’ve learned to pay less attention to the noise and more attention to the patterns. Everyone panics when a new competitor enters the market or when there’s a technology breakthrough. But those aren’t necessarily signals to pivot.

The signals I watch for are:

• When your best customers start asking for things you can’t deliver

• When your team starts having to work around your own systems to serve clients properly

• When the effort to acquire new customers suddenly spikes without obvious cause

• When industries adjacent to yours start experiencing fundamental shifts
  

4. How do you keep teams focused and aligned when the environment keeps changing? Honestly? You can’t keep people aligned through constant communication about change. You’ll exhaust them. Instead, I try to focus on the things that don’t change even when everything else does.

Your mission doesn’t change. Your values don’t change. The problems you’re solving for customers might evolve, but the fact that you’re here to solve meaningful problems doesn’t change. When people understand and believe in these constants, they can handle tremendous variability in the “how.”

I also think we underestimate how much uncertainty people can handle if they trust leadership and understand the context. At Brand chemistry, we’re radically transparent about market conditions, client feedback, and strategic experiments. When someone understands why we’re trying something new, they’re far more likely to lean in rather than resist.

5. Can you share a time when volatility actually created an opportunity — and how you responded? At Sinorbis during COVID, we watched international student recruitment – our core business – vanish overnight. Chinese students couldn’t travel, universities couldn’t host visits, recruitment fairs were dead.

Instead of waiting it out, we built a virtual platform within weeks that connected Chinese students directly with foreign universities. But here’s what made it work: we didn’t just digitise the old recruitment model. We reimagined it entirely.

We realised COVID had exposed problems that always existed – the cost of recruitment fairs, limited touchpoints, information asymmetry. Our virtual platform actually solved these better than the traditional model ever did.

I think the lesson in that is that true volatility-driven opportunity isn’t about quick pivots or emergency measures. It’s about using disruption to finally fix what was always broken but too entrenched to change. When the old way becomes impossible, you get permission to build what should have existed all along.

6. What’s one mindset or habit that helps you lead effectively in uncertain conditions? I create deliberate pockets of offline thinking throughout each day. No screens during meals. A short walk at lunch without my phone. The weekend trail run or mountain bike ride. These aren’t just breaks – they’re when the actual processing happens.

Everyone’s consuming 10x more content than five years ago, but who’s actually digesting any of it? While LinkedIn serves up “game-changing” AI tools every morning and X manufactures fresh urgency hourly, the real strategic thinking happens in the gaps between the noise.

The irony isn’t lost on me – in an age of exponential technological change, my most valuable leadership tool is essentially just... stopping. But you can’t lead through uncertainty if you’re constantly reacting to everyone else’s uncertainty. The best strategic decisions come from thinking, not scrolling. Even fifteen minutes of actual reflection beats three hours of consuming other people’s hot takes. TLDR

Hoymann’s perspective is a reminder that volatility doesn’t just test strategies, it exposes their weak points. The organisations that thrive aren’t those with the most detailed plans, but those with the clearest guardrails, the fastest learning cycles, and the discipline to separate noise from signal.

In environments where the future refuses to sit still, strategy isn’t about predicting what’s next, it’s about building the capacity to adapt, again and again.