In times of uncertainty, zoom out, not in.

The art of asking questions that expand perspective.

“In today’s perma-crisis world, waiting for stability is like waiting for a train that’s never coming.” In her recent Harvard Business Review article, Cheryl Strauss Einhorn, the founder and CEO of Decisive, is sharing 4 questions a leader can ask in order to have a “better analysis, reframe risk, and strengthen your decision-making muscles.”

She offers that “strategic decision-making isn’t about having all the answers; it’s about asking the questions that move you toward wiser, more resilient outcomes.” And those questions are not only there to help you find answers, but to expand your thinking, so that you can “see your choices from new perspectives.”

What kind of questions are those? In stable time, leaders typically aim to “reduce ambiguity: what’s the return on investment? What’s our timeline?”. The challenge is that during volatile times, this research for certainty “can create an illusion of control, blinding you to emerging risks, obscuring valuable opportunities, or keeping you locked in yesterday’s logic while the world moves on.”

So, let’s look at those 4 “mindset expansion” questions:

• “What decision today will still make sense a year from now?: helps you to inject long-term thinking into short-term chaos. The question acts as a filter—helping teams (…) to make decisions that align with where they want to go rather than simply reinforcing where they are.”

  
  

• “If a year from now this decision was used as an example of our leadership, what would it teach?” This is the perfect values/mission/purpose stress-test question. How does this specific decision align with who we are and what we are aiming to be?

  
  

• “What if this isn’t the storm—what if it’s the climate?” realizing that the ambiguity is here to stay, as a systemic change, a trend, not a data point. It requires us to change fundamentally our way of thinking and acting.

  
  

• “What’s the cost of waiting?: in a crisis, the instinct to pause, can feel responsible and prudent. Leaders are taught to avoid rushing, to reduce risk, and to base decisions on evidence. But in volatile environments, the pursuit of perfect clarity often conceals a hidden cost: the cost of inaction”: what is the cost of action and what is the cost of inaction?

Predictions are difficult, particularly when they are about the future (!). These questions will not help you make better predictions, “they’re here to help you think more clearly right now, cutting through noise, surfacing blind spots, and creating momentum when you feel stuck.”