Process-based management in times of global uncertainty

We may debate indications, degrees, and causes, but we can be certain that we live with global uncertainty. This paper explores how process-based management enables uncertainty as a driver for improved performance, rather than letting it overwhelm and destroy.

Global instability leads to unpredictable supply chains – Boeing’s international sourcing operations have been significantly affected by US tariff changes.

Economic uncertainty alters consumer behavior – Tesla’s EU sales halved in April 2025 amid trade tensions and shifting sentiment.

Volatile markets and policy shifts create uncertainty in future performance – unable to make reliable forecasts General Motors withdrew its 2025 earnings guidance and halted its share buyback program.

Uncertainty impacts are not limited to multinationals. Many smaller businesses are suffering problems of market access, shipping capacity shortages, talent loss, cost variability, and customer spending decline, not to mention impacts of increasingly severe weather events.

In our interconnected, if not integrated, world, global uncertainty is significantly impacting organizations of all sizes, everywhere, in all sectors.

… surely, we can be certain that we live in times of global uncertainty …
Can process-based management reduce uncertainty? Can it help to cope with inevitable uncertainties?

The level of uncertainty has increased over the last decade. The level is higher, and the variation is greater. Are we increasingly uncertain about uncertainty? Is the current increase in uncertainty a temporary aberration or is it the new norm, an uncertain baseline for further increases?

At a country level we can expect continuing emphasis on strategic onshoring, stronger border controls, increased defense spending, greater scrutiny of government spending, societal reengineering, and generally more volatility in policy settings and the social disruption that may accompany such volatility. For those countries that have the luxury of being able to do so, a more insular approach is likely a national driver.

For organizations, the challenges and changes are no less difficult and profound. Key organizational themes in response to uncertainty are resilience, diversification, optionality, performance, flexibility, automation, digitization, and transparency. For those that cannot meet the challenges, the inevitable key theme is failure.

While organizations can’t really be fluid in design and operation, they will need to be a lot more malleable and responsive.

Can process-based management reduce uncertainty? Might it help organizations to better cope with inevitable uncertainties?

Process-based management offers several ways organizations can navigate, and for the optimists amongst us, thrive during times of global uncertainty and disruption, drawing on the fundamental principle that organizational performance is delivered through cross-functional business processes.

Organization-wide process-based management capabilities deliver increased agility, tighter focus, enhanced knowledge, managed risks, and better-informed decision making.

Here are some of the ways in which these benefits are realized.

Enhanced Organizational Agility Moderates Uncertainty Impacts

Process-based management provides enhanced organizational agility to respond to the challenges and disruption caused by uncertainty.

To respond appropriately to change, an organization must be able to detect change as soon as possible. Detecting a change that has already happened is not good enough. We manage the future, not the past.

Organizations must predict the future and have a way to track progress towards that expectation. Then they must be able to react nimbly to the inevitable unforeseen changes.

Process-based management is powerful equipment for organizations to add to their toolboxes to enhance this agility.

The constant cycling of the Tregear Circles, encompassing both process management and process improvement, creates a “perpetual improvement engine” that aids continuous adaptation and responsiveness to change.

Identifying high-impact processes, setting effective process KPIs and targets, and closely tracking – even predicting – performance provides the necessary foundation for agility and responsiveness.

Understanding How Work Really Gets Done Tames Uncertainty Impacts

Process-based management reveals how work really gets done exposing what must be measured and managed in the face of uncertainty.

For all its focus on the detailed machinery of organizational operations and management, traditional management approaches have failed to properly capture how work really gets done, i.e., how value (products, services, experiences) is created and delivered, i.e., how strategic intent is executed.

The organization chart shows how we design, measure, and manage our organizations, but when we get to do the work that really matters it’s about collaboration across the organization, across the organization chart.

We are clear about how we create our organizations, but not how they create the value they exist to produce.

The value realization engine is about cross-functional business processes.

In these times of WFH, hybrid, and “Get Back Into The Office!” modes of working creating remote work and shifting operations, understanding the variations in “how we work, how we get stuff done” becomes crucial.

This also applies beyond our organizational walls. No organization exists in isolation. Our lives, business and personal, are a supply chain of simple and complex collaborations. It might feel like it is “us against the world”, but it must always be “us and the world” even if we would prefer otherwise.

In a world of increasing uncertainty, we must strive to develop and maintain a deep understanding of the context in which we operate. Only through such profound knowledge comes the mastery that will allow foresight and responsive agility.

Process-based management focuses on the cross-functional, end-to-end processes through which all value is created, accumulated, and delivered. This clarity provides a fundamental understanding of the operational reality, regardless of physical location or context, and the practical tools to make evidence-based, risk-minimized strategic and operational changes.

Without such knowledge, absent such competencies, we can only be reactive to change and too reliant on guesswork.

Knowing Performance with Calculated Certainty Subdues Uncertainty Impacts

You may argue if the axiom “You can’t manage what you can’t measure” is valid, but we can surely agree that the right performance data helps – a lot.

To do effective process improvement we must do effective process performance measurement, else how do we know if anything has improved—indeed, how would we know what needs to improve and by how much. That’s clear, and surely uncontested.

Global uncertainty introduces volatility in performance and expectations of performance. The essential goals of process-based management are to know how our key processes should perform, are performing, could perform, and will perform.

This knowledge may be challenging to acquire, and therefore even more vital to know, in times where volatility is certain but hard to usefully forecast.

Assigning KPIs to processes—Process KPIs or PKPIs—along with practical targets, can be more challenging than expected, but is always a valuable investment.

The key question is always “If this process was performing as its key stakeholders want it to, what would it be doing and how would we know?” Answering this question puts us at the heart of what we mean by good performance.

Setting PKPIs and targets is useless if they are not actively used. The Tregear Circles provides a framework for the continuous sensing of, and responding to, process performance change.

To continually assess current and future performance, take the pulse of the process. We can help to mitigate the impacts of uncertainty by bringing as much certainty as possible to our knowledge about organizational performance.

This requires a simple but effective framework for continuously and actively managing high-impact processes, allowing us to be both responsive to, and safely initiate, change.

The best way to fix a performance problem is to avoid having it in the first place. Often the best way to improve process performance is to incorporate some innovative idea and those ideas don’t spontaneously arrive—Enable Innovation is a process!

Of course, we are doing all this in the context of cross-functional management, involving Process Owners and their Process Stakeholder Groups managing in collaboration to optimize cross-function performance. In many organizations this is novel and difficult.

To gain the benefits of process performance management in uncertain times, we must be certain about how process governance works—the process of process management should be our best managed process.

Predicting Performance with Known Certainty Quells Uncertainty Impacts

In dealing with uncertainty we must filter out measurement noise and focus relentlessly on signals that lead to actionable control opportunities.

While it is important to understand and learn from what has already happened, an essential test of effective management is whether future performance can be predicted with any useful certainty. If not, management can only be reactive rather than active, indicating a low level of control over the process and its outputs. This is more difficult, and therefore all the more important, in uncertain times.

It’s sensible and necessary to report on past performance, but wouldn’t it be even more useful if we could also predict future performance? Nice to know what happened last month, but what will happen next month?

Using the Process Behavior Chart (PBC) to analyze variation, identify signals of change (both positive and negative), and make predictions about future performance is an indicator of process management mastery. A PBC allows us to filter out natural performance variations that have no discernible cause, to avoid wasting time and effort on unproductive distractions.

A stable process has predictable performance limits unless something changes. That may seem obvious, but the important thing is that these limits can be calculated and tracked with a PBC. We calculate, track, and update a band of performance within which any variation is normal and can be safely ignored – nothing to see here, move on! Performance that is outside those limits, or trending to move outside, tells us that something has changed and that we can productively assess the cause—performance improvement opportunity sighted!

A PBC can’t remove global uncertainty, but it can reduce local uncertainty, and in uncertain times, every opportunity to see more clearly through the fog is valuable and welcome.

Identifying and Managing Risks Mitigates Uncertainty Impacts

A risk that is known and managed is no longer a risk, it’s a certainty. Process-based management exposes previously unknown risks.

Risk events occur in our processes and those of customers, intermediaries, partners, and other stakeholders. Supply chain disruptions, such as a pandemic, major weather events, or global trade changes, expose dependencies that were previously not fully understood.

When European auto parts plants suspend output because a trade dispute between two external countries is causing a shortage of a small but vital component, the nature and uncertainty of the complex supply chain in which we live and work, is dramatically exposed.

Focusing on cross-functional processes inherently highlights these dependencies and collaboration failure risks— “white space” risks—that traditional vertical management might miss. Actively searching for, and discovering, where the risks can arise within these processes is essential for resilience at any time, and especially during times of uncertainty.

Decisions Based on Deep Knowledge Controls Uncertainty Impacts

Accumulating as much knowledge as possible about high-impact processes counteracts the drag of uncertainty and enhances decision making quality.

At any time, management requires many decisions, and organizational performance is dependent on the cumulative quality of those decisions. In times of uncertainty the decisions required are likely more pressured, numerous, and difficult, and their consequences are more fateful.

By documenting the interplay between internal and external processes, process-based management can produce deep knowledge about high-impact processes, hence enabling effective decisions.

Comprehensive understanding of the proven, valued, business benefits that should be delivered by each high-impact process provides an objective standard against which actual and anticipated performance can be measured.

Decision events can also be foreshadowed and simulated, allowing key decisions to be rehearsed and information shortfalls corrected and process vulnerabilities resolved.

Focusing on High-Impact Processes Reduces Uncertainty Impacts

Times of uncertainty require serious choices about where to focus finite resources in the face of seemingly infinite unpredictability.

Not all processes are equal. In any organization there are processes whose failure would barely be noticed. There are other processes whose failure, or even slightly degraded performance, will have a massive impact, potentially jeopardizing organizational viability.

At which end of that impact spectrum should we focus? Yes, obviously.

Depending where you are in a process hierarchy, there are hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of processes that make an organization work.

Especially in times of great uncertainty, it is vital to know which of those processes has the greatest potential for improvement and which can incapacitate the organization.

There may also be processes that can act as a lead indicator—a canary in the coal mine—of the onset, or at least possibility, of disruptive performance degradation.

With limited resources and heightened pressure during uncertainty, organizations need to prioritize their efforts by actively managing the high-impact processes with significant performance improvement potential or considerable impact if they perform poorly.

This selective focus ensures that management and improvement efforts are directed where they will have the maximum impact on organizational performance, a critical consideration in challenging times.

Realizing Opportunities and Innovation Repurposes Uncertainty Impacts

There’s nothing like an existential threat to increase focus on new ways to execute value propositions, i.e. on business process innovation.

It would be hard to argue that high and increasing levels of global uncertainty are a virtue. Uncertainty creates … uncertainty, an attribute with negative effects in most circumstances. However, it’s not all downsides. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger etc.—an aphorism said in some form by everybody in the last several millennia.

Consider this scenario. US retailers like Walmart, Target, and Home Depot account for about half of the global container shipping volume. Walmart, the largest U.S. importer of containerized goods, generates 40% of its sales from items sourced primarily from countries targeted by new tariff arrangements. Retail consumers are increasingly impacted by cost-of-living pressures and discretionary spending is retrained. A conservative estimate (assuming substantial tariff cost absorption) of the sales shortfall for these three companies in 2025 is US$15 billion with Walmart bearing two-thirds of that hit.

Our world is a supply chain of supply chains, and the negative impacts also flow. If you own a fleet of ships, trains, or trucks used to move those goods around the world, you also have a big problem. Even with deliberately cautious assumptions, the global logistics solutions provider, A.P. Moller – Maersk’s 2025 top line is likely to be some US$1 billion lower than it would have been without the new tariffs.

The existential threat caused by uncertainty forces innovation. With volatility as a constant, optionality is a hedge against policy or climate shocks. Operating models need elasticity and resilience. Solutions are needed that allow dynamic reallocation of resources. Deep, AI-assisted data analysis is needed to forecast supply and demand and to predict likely end-to-end supply chain costs. These are no longer just interesting research questions, but mission critical development projects.

And at the core of that analysis and development must be profound understanding of the cross-functional, cross-company, cross-border processes that create, accumulate, and deliver organizational value to stakeholders. This is no longer optional.

Increasing Certainty in an Uncertain World

By providing a clear, practical framework for understanding, measuring, managing, and continuously improving the processes that deliver value, process-based management equips organizations with the tools and mindset needed to enhance agility, make informed decisions, manage risks, and seize opportunities, all of which are vital during periods of global uncertainty. It provides a framework and knowledgebase with which to understand and optimize the realities of strategy execution.

The focus shifts from simply hoping things will work out, to actively managing the realities of how work gets done, and to being able to respond effectively as those realities change.

Roger Tregear
Bungendore
July 2025