I’ve been speaking with a lot of people recently across HR, OD, L&D and consultancy. Senior and experienced people who have led real change and real work.

The same patterns keep coming up:

• Roles are taking longer to define and appoint
• Consultancy pipelines are thinner
• Procurement cycles are slower
• Recruitment processes stall quietly halfway through

This isn’t about capability and it isn’t that the work has disappeared but the context has changed.

I’ve said this before but we’re operating inside a convergence of PESTLE pressures which are more extreme than ever:

• Political volatility
• Economic caution and deferred investment
• Social fatigue and value-shift
• Technological acceleration driven by AI
• Legal and governance pressure
• Environmental sustainability mandates reshaping priorities

In learning, the technological is stark. AI is changing the relationships between knowledge, skill and work and the market hasn’t caught up yet.

What we’re seeing in organisations is not chaos, or VUCA; VUCA just describes the environment.

What we are seeing is Strategic Ambiguity.

Organisations know change is required but haven’t yet aligned on the direction, the pace or the risks. That means decisions pause, work stalls, and momentum drops. In L&D that often shows up as: more, faster, broader – the “do more training” reflex – without clarity of what problem it is trying to solve.

It means hiring slows, procurement pauses and work “almost happens” but doesn’t move. I’ve experienced this with three organisations in the last 12 months or so.

For the individual this feels really personal:
“Why is this so hard?” and “Why is no one responding?”

But this is systemic.

We are not in a skills crisis.
We are in a clarity crisis.

Everything will feel slow until organisations can clearly say:

• What work matters now
• What humans need to be able to do that AI cannot do for them
• And how learning will happen in the work itself rather than around it

This is not a moment for urgency, it’s a moment for sensemaking. Because once we can name what’s actually happening, we can work with the system as it is now, not the system we wish we had.

We are not waiting for the market to return. It isn’t going back.

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#StrategicAmbiguity #Sensemaking #FutureOfWork