Three Strategic Moves for Leaders in Foggy Conditions
When business conditions shift fast, leaders feel the urgency to act—but not always the clarity to act wisely.
In a conversation with brand strategist and Sticky Branding founder Jeremy Miller, we explore what practical leadership looks like when the path ahead is anything but obvious. His perspective: strong brands and strong teams make progress not by waiting for certainty but by building frameworks for smart decisions when clarity is limited.
This post shares three insights from that conversation. Each one applies directly to project leaders navigating friction, ambiguity, or initiatives that drift off course.
1. Use Pressure Intentionally, Not Habitually
Jeremy describes writing his book Brand New Name under extreme deadline pressure—60,000 words in two weeks. His conditions are intense, but not chaotic. They are by design.
At Sticky Branding, deadlines aren’t reactionary. They engineer them. His team uses what he calls “panic monster” deadlines strategically—but sparingly. The key is ensuring that high-pressure moments are grounded in trust, which involves having clear expectations, psychological safety, and a mutual commitment to the outcome.
It’s a sharp contrast to what we often see in project environments: pressure is applied reactively, not intentionally. Urgency becomes a habit. Teams operate in a state of chronic near-failure, which erodes trust, focus, and ultimately performance.
The fix isn’t to eliminate pressure. It’s to calibrate it.
Leaders can create forward momentum by setting constraints that align with their purpose and by removing arbitrary ones that lead to burnout or avoidance.
Application for project teams: Use short planning sprints, pre-schedule retros, or 30-day success definitions to build pressure that drives insight and motion, not stress.
2. Diagnose: Are You Fighting, Fleeing, or Freezing?
When strategy breaks down, leaders tend to fall into one of three patterns:
– Fight: Restructure, reframe, and act with urgency.
– Flee: Step out of the space or deprioritize the work.
– Freeze: Stay in place, revisiting the same conversations.
Freezing is the most expensive response, because it consumes time and resources without producing progress. Jeremy makes this point clearly: teams that freeze are often still busy, but nothing is actually moving forward.
In projects, this looks like open questions that never close. Priorities that keep shifting without explanation. Delivery teams are stuck in feedback loops when no one is naming the real issue.
The question isn’t “Are we working hard?” It’s “Are we progressing?”
Often, the answer lies in whether the team revisits the business case. Too many teams commit to the original ROI logic long after the environment changes. Smart leaders build checkpoints to revalidate assumptions and don’t hesitate to pause or pivot when the value picture changes.
Application: Add value checkpoints before every major delivery phase. “Is this still worth doing?” or, “Are we solving the right problem?”
3. Link Accountability to Shared Purpose
Jeremy’s words keep echoing in my mind:
“When everyone owns the results, no one avoids accountability.”
That level of accountability only works when teams know what they’re responsible for and why it matters.
Too many project structures focus on role clarity, but skip purpose clarity. When the team doesn’t understand the broader goal—or doesn’t believe in it—they default to task execution, not outcome delivery.
Psychological safety doesn’t mean no pressure. It refers to the kind of pressure that encourages risk-taking, adaptation, and truth-telling.
If the team doesn’t feel safe calling out misalignment, then misalignment will be baked in.
Application for leaders: Replace status check-ins with strategy check-ins. Ask, “What feels unclear right now? Where are we drifting from the goal?” You’ll learn more from that conversation than from ten Gantt charts.
Final Takeaway: Strategy in Motion
The throughline in my conversation with Jeremy was this: Effective leaders don’t wait for perfect visibility. They act with intent, design for adaptation, and stay close to where value is being created.
For project teams, that means:
– Reframing decisions when assumptions shift
– Using momentum intentionally—not constantly
– Defining success in a way that aligns with purpose, not just output
Here is my takeaway: when the path ahead feels foggy, it is not a reason to stop. Instead, it’s a chance to ask better questions.
Learn More from Jeremy
Jeremy Miller is the founder of Sticky Branding, where he and his team help mid-sized companies build resilient brand strategies and navigate growth inflection points. He’s the author of Sticky Branding and Brand New Name.
Follow Jeremy on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/jeremymiller
