There’s a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from trying to build something when the ground keeps shifting.
It doesn’t announce itself. It sneaks up on you—in the form of a calendar that’s full but doesn’t feel productive, a team that’s working hard but can’t point to what’s moving, a strategy document that keeps getting revised but never quite lands.
I’ve been inside organizations where this was the norm. I’ve also been the leader who created it. Both are instructive.
When Vision Is Unclear, Tactics Fill the Vacuum
Here’s what happens when strategic direction is murky but no one names it: everyone gets busy.
A new tactic gets suggested. Let’s do a webinar—that’ll attract buyers. Let’s add a newsletter—that’ll nurture contacts. Let’s get everyone posting once a week—that’ll sharpen the message. Each idea sounds reasonable in isolation. None of them get taken off the list. The list just grows.
I’ve talked about this dynamic before—how a long “what’s not working” list is often a symptom of accumulated tactics rather than a strategy problem. The audit reveals it clearly: a pile of initiatives, each with a different owner, none of them connected by a shared direction.
Focusing on tactics is easier than naming the real problem. It feels productive. It creates motion. And motion, when you’re uncertain, is a reasonable substitute for progress—until it isn’t.
Leaders don’t always realize what they’re doing. I didn’t always realize what I was doing. When you can’t put your finger on what’s not working, you add. When you want to innovate and try new things, you add. When someone comes to you with a compelling idea, you add. Nobody’s taking anything off the plate. And the team is the one absorbing the weight of everything that gets put on it.
What It Costs the People Doing the Work
At first, a new challenge can feel invigorating. A new problem to solve. New territory. The team leans in.
But there’s a point where invigorating tips into something else. Where the plates you’re trying to keep spinning start to feel less like a challenge and more like a liability. You know something is going to slip. You don’t know which thing. So you try to keep everything moving—and the trying itself becomes the job.
The people on the implementing end of a shifting vision are often the last ones to name what’s actually happening. They don’t want to disappoint. They don’t want to be the one who says it’s too much. So they keep going. And quietly, in the back of their heads, something unnamed starts to take hold.
They start wondering if they’re good enough. If they’re missing something everyone else can see. If the reason nothing is landing is because of them, not the conditions they’re working in.
I’ve been in that headspace. It’s not a small thing. It affects how you show up, how you make decisions, how much risk you’re willing to take. Errors start creeping in—not because people are careless but because they’re stretched past the point where care is sustainable. And errors, in a marketing function that’s already under scrutiny, have a way of compounding the doubt.
I had a content strategist once who was trying to build a thought leadership program while managing a diverse group of subject matter experts—without the infrastructure to support either. I believed she could handle the ambiguity of building something without all the answers. I was wrong. She left abruptly. And while I was frustrated in the moment, with time I’ve come to see it differently: she didn’t fail the situation. The situation failed her. The conditions I’d allowed to persist made it impossible to succeed.
That’s a hard thing to sit with. But it’s important to name, because it’s the part of shifting-vision organizations that rarely gets acknowledged—the human cost to the people trying to implement inside them.
The Naming Problem
One of the most useful things a marketing leader can do in an ambiguous environment is name what’s actually happening.
Not in a dramatic way. Not as an accusation or an ultimatum. But clearly: the challenge we’re facing isn’t a tactics problem. We don’t have enough shared direction to make the tactics work.
I haven’t always done this well. There are situations where I held back from naming it—because I wasn’t sure I’d be heard, because the organizational dynamics made it feel unsafe, because I kept hoping clarity would come if I just waited a little longer. Sometimes I waited too long. The cost of waiting is that the team keeps paying the price while the naming keeps getting deferred.
When the vision is broken and stays unnamed, the instinct is to protect it by working around it—adjusting tactics, shifting focus, finding workarounds. What that actually does is give the broken vision more time to do damage.
Naming it doesn’t always fix it. But it changes the conversation. It makes the real problem visible. And visibility, even when it’s uncomfortable, is the prerequisite for coordination.
What You Can Actually Build on When the Ground Keeps Shifting
This is the practical question, and I want to answer it honestly rather than optimistically.
You probably can’t fix the vision. That’s above your pay grade, outside your control or both. What you can do is find the parts that hold true regardless—the immovable pieces that stay stable even when everything else is in motion.
What does your audience actually need? That tends to be more durable than any particular strategic direction.
What has consistently worked, even in the chaos? There’s usually something—a channel, a message, a type of content—that performs regardless of what’s happening internally.
What’s the one thing that, if you could only do one thing, would move the needle? Not the most interesting thing. Not the newest idea. The most foundational.
Marketing foundations aren’t about having everything figured out before you build. They’re about identifying what holds true no matter what—and anchoring there while everything else gets sorted.
This is harder than it sounds. It requires saying no to things that sound good. It requires pushing back on the tactic suggestions with a clear articulation of why they don’t serve the direction you do have. It requires being honest with leadership—and with yourself—about what the organization is actually ready to execute.
And sometimes it requires acknowledging that the conditions won’t allow you to build what you know needs to be built. That’s a painful recognition. But it’s also a real one, and pretending otherwise doesn’t serve anyone—least of all the team that’s trying to do the work.
The Foundation Is the Strategy
There’s a tendency to think of marketing foundations as the unglamorous prerequisite—the thing you do before the real work starts. The infrastructure that enables the interesting stuff later.
I’d argue it’s the opposite. In a high-ambiguity environment, the foundation is the strategy. It’s the thing that keeps the organization from spinning in place. It’s the difference between a team that’s busy and a team that’s building.
When the vision keeps changing, the people who stay grounded are the ones who know what they’re anchoring on. They’re not immune to the disruption. But they have something to return to when the latest pivot lands—a set of truths that hold, a layer of infrastructure that doesn’t need to be rebuilt every time the direction shifts.
That’s not a perfect solution. But in organizations where the vision is still finding itself, it might be the most honest one available.
And it’s enough to start building on.
