Can People Endure Disruption Long Enough for Strategy to Pay Off?

EY’s 2025 CEO Outlook is loud and clear: in a world of accelerating volatility, resisting disruption is no longer an option—CEOs are being told to lean into it.

It’s one thing to map disruption in a boardroom. It’s another to live through it at the kitchen table.  So, the real question is this: Can your people sustain that lean strategy across months or years without snapping?

The Current Picture: Resilience, Risk, and Ripples

Disruption isn’t new. We’ve been calling it different names for years—agility, adaptability, and waste elimination through process efficiency. What’s new is the accumulated toll.

Today, disruption is everywhere:

• A looming U.S. government shutdown could furlough hundreds of thousands of workers

• Continued U.S. layoffs at Starbucks, Meta, Microsoft, UPS, Nike, and others underscore that disruption is no longer theoretical. Business Insider

• Companies are pivoting aggressively—AI adoption, portfolio reinvention, operational efficiency plays—moves cited by over half of CEOs in EY’s 2025 Outlook.

To a CEO’s eye, these moves look like organizational strength. In fact, 57% of CEOs in EY’s survey expect uncertainty to linger beyond a year, and 52% are investing more to accelerate transformation.

But disruption ripples from spreadsheets to employees, and far beyond.

• A job loss isn’t just a professional setback. It breaks family budgets and frays childcare plans.

• In communities, layoffs multiply stress, reduce spending, and increase strain on social systems.

• Inside companies, those who remain wear extra hats, absorb shadow work, and carry the emotional load of colleagues who are gone, all while quietly wondering if they’re next.

To employees, the dinner-table conversation isn’t about resilience. It’s about how to survive the week.

When “Leaning Into Disruption” Backfires

Those dinner-table realities eventually show up at work. And when they do, disruption without the right support backfires. I’ve already unpacked some of this in my three-part Perfect Storm series, but in a nutshell, here’s what happens:

• Attrition in disguise. Headcount stability can mask the fact that your best people are quietly disengaging, retreating into quiet quitting, or walking out the door.

• Narrative vacuums. A lack of understanding creates a void that employees fill with rumors, suspicion, and fear.

• Endurance gaps. Even the strongest strategies fail if people burn out before they see the outcome. When execution breaks down, so does growth, innovation, and market confidence.

That last one is the real danger. You can have a brilliant strategy, but if the human system buckles, execution derails—and the costs echo far beyond turnover.

Building Scaffolding for Endurance

Organizations that want to endure disruption need to give employees a reason to hold on. Leaders need scaffolding—practical, cultural, and communicative—that helps people rise above volatility together as a team to achieve greater results.

Here are three shifts internal communicators can help leaders weave into their cadence now:

1. Create Islands of Certainty. Employees want to work for a company they believe in. When everything feels in flux, they look to leadership for something steady to hold on to. Communicators reinforce those anchors—rituals, values, non-negotiables—so people know what remains firm even as other things shift.

2. Close the Narrative Gap. Employees don’t expect perfect answers. What they need is a believable cadence of updates: what we know, what we don’t, and what we’ll do next. Internal comms designs that rhythm, translates strategy into plain language, and prevents silence from being filled by fear.

3. Treat Trust as Capital. Trust isn’t soft. It’s measurable. High-trust cultures recover faster from shocks, waste less energy on rumor control, and retain critical talent longer. Communicators help leaders demonstrate fairness, consistency, and openness in tone, timing, and delivery.

The Human-Centric Stake

If disruption is inevitable, then one thing must remain non-negotiable: your company’s humanity.

Put a stake in the ground. Say it out loud: We will be a human-centric company.

That becomes your North Star. When disruption hits, when the pressure mounts, when boards demand more with less—every decision is measured against that stake. Lean into change, yes. But not at the expense of dignity, belonging, or trust.

The Real Leadership Test

Disruption isn’t going away. But leaning in isn’t enough. The real test is whether your people can endure it long enough to see the strategy through.

So ask yourself:

When the next shock comes, will your people be braced with you—or bracing against you?

If they brace with you, that’s strategy in motion. If they brace against you, the cost runs far deeper than profit margins or quarterly results.