With tariffs, trade wars, AI, and profitability pressure, chaos is now the constant for most companies. Today’s commerce leaders have to shepherd their teams through ongoing uncertainty and make adaptability a core capability.
There’s no clear playbook for how to navigate change.
However, executives from major CPG brands, including Kenvue, Spectrum Brands, and Monster Energy, shared a potential framework leaders can use during a 2026 Digital Shelf Summit (DSS) session: “The Unwritten Playbook: Executives on Leading Through Radical Uncertainty.”
Here are the seven principles they follow — and you can, too — to move the business forward amid disruption.
Outdated rule: Trying to guarantee precise outcomes before making a move.
New rule: Cultivating adaptability as a mission-critical skill.
Ben Galvin, senior director of omnichannel retail sales and ecommerce at Monster Energy, says that to successfully usher their teams through change, leaders must start by sharing what isn’t changing.
“It's really important to anchor your team in what doesn't change,” he says. “In a lot of ways, the customer is still the same, and a lot of what you do [is still the same].”
Monster Energy has focused on making adaptability “an organizational muscle.”
According to Galvin, “[It] brings clarity — not necessarily the confidence of what we're doing, but the clarity about where we're going. That organizational muscle, built over time, can ultimately help bring everybody along.”
Clarity also can come from showing employees how they benefit from change, adds Danika Johansen, vice president and head of U.S. digital commerce at Kenvue.
Johansen gave the example of her social commerce team learning how to engage customers on TikTok Shop. This new channel required a new strategy, but allowed them to develop emerging, in-demand skills.
“There's amazing learning opportunities and development opportunities for people, so I think reframing it from [the standpoint], as Ben said, ‘here are some things that aren't changing, but the things that are, are actually going to be really amazing personal development opportunities for people on the team, too.’”
When leaders focus on clarity rather than certainty, change can feel less intimidating for employees and be reframed as a growth opportunity.
Outdated rule: The C-suite’s instincts shape the priority list.
New rule: Customer needs define which priorities to tackle and when.
Mir Zaman, vice president, ecommerce sales, operations, digital media and content at Spectrum Brands, has an unconventional approach to change management.
He puts the customer figuratively in the room.
“In a lot of executive meetings, what I do is I symbolically put a chair in the room that is empty, and it actually represents the customer,” he says. “So, when you're making tough decisions, when you're talking about ROI, when you're talking about should we invest in something that has a 12-month to 18-month horizon to see the ROI, should we do it? I think the obvious answer is yes, if the customer is being represented appropriately.”
Zaman says this strategy centers customers’ needs when the organization is weighing several competing priorities.
Organizations always will have to grapple with market, technological, and internal shifts. But when they feel the need to make everything a priority, they can use the customer to define what priorities actually matter most.
Outdated rule: “Start small.”
New rule: “Go big, fail fast.”
For years, the guiding principle around experimentation has always been test and learn, but leaders at the DSS Summit argued that organizations should embrace experimentation at scale instead.
Smaller pilots often reduce perceived risk, but they don’t provide the same level of applicable learning as bigger tests. Technology now changes every six months, Galvin says, so organizations need to experiment at a more meaningful scale.
“You need to try something out at scale to see if it's actually going to work, versus doing smaller tests or proving out a test case before you scale it,” he says. “Because ultimately, as the tools continue to evolve, if you're not testing at scale, you're actually not testing it appropriately.”
The rapid nature of change today requires companies to be less timid. They need to fully commit to a culture of experimentation, where they learn fast — and potentially, fail fast — and adapt from there.
Outdated rule: Revenue is the primary measure of success.
New rule: Learning is a metric that matters to the business.
Johansen says that for organizations to truly embrace a culture of experimentation, they have to reshape what outcomes they measure employees against.
You can’t encourage people to take risks and penalize them when they fail. Johansen says financial outcomes can’t be the only success metric, which is admittedly harder for large public organizations to wrap their heads around. She argues that learning also has to be an outcome organizations track
“We have P&L [profit and loss] responsibilities, but including in key learnings as some of those desired outcomes allows people to have the intellectual honesty to share more about failure,” Johansen says.
“When you set learning as an objective in addition to your financial outcomes, I've seen that it creates more of a safe space for people to share back what has worked well, and critically, what hasn't, so that you can apply those learnings to future situations.”
Zaman adds that it’s crucial to make failure visible, especially at the very top levels of the organization. When he worked at Amazon, this was the norm. The company created a culture of taking risks and often rewarded employees for it.
“I could probably tell you guys about more failures than successes I've had at Amazon, but that led to some of my promotions because of the learnings that came,” he says. “That culture [of taking risks] can be very helpful to let people try something completely new, where they haven't really had the courage to go and explore.”
Not hiding failure and reframing what success looks like can give teams license to take calculated, strategically aligned risks that ultimately advance the business.
Outdated rule: Only one team can own an outcome.
New rule: Transformation is a shared responsibility.
Bigger bets require enterprise thinking and organization-wide engagement.
In commerce organizations, we’ve traditionally seen change occur and be owned within silos. Digital transformation is the perfect example of this, as digital commerce teams typically led this change, Johansen says.
But the next era of ecommerce transformation requires shared accountability. Johansen says leaders need to make this clear for their teams — that the organization will win or lose together, so everyone must have an ownership stake in whatever transformation the company is navigating.
Kenvue, for example, has positioned digital as an enterprise growth engine that requires effective cross-functional collaboration to fuel it.
Once leaders communicate this priority, they should then work with their peers across departments to create opportunities for people to learn and build together. Johansen says lunch-and-learns aren’t the most effective approach for this. Hands-on, heads-down work is what makes the most progress.
“Creating some mechanisms for people to both learn the theory and do work across functions is really, really, really important," she says. “Creating some hands-on work for people has been a critical unlock for us."
Outdated rule: Change is a collective experience.
New rule: Organizational resilience is built one employee at a time.
Change doesn’t just happen to organizations; it happens to the people within them.
People experience change differently, so companies must be mindful of this and better prepare employees for radical uncertainty. This is where top-down messaging and leading with vision are vital.
“You can never underestimate the power of the very top,” Johansen says. “Having confidence in that long-term vision and that direction down from the very top, from the CEO, is really critical to create that personal commitment.
Employee resilience will influence organizational resilience, so companies need to not only establish a clear direction, but also constantly engage employees, nurture their buy-in, and check in with them about how they’re experiencing change.
That will make employees feel less like change is happening to them and more invested in shaping the organization’s new direction.
Outdated rule: Navigating disruption requires operational excellence.
New rule: Effectively leading through disruption requires teaching through disruption.
Lastly, it’s important for leaders to lead with infectious curiosity, Zaman says.
They need to be curious enough about disruption to explore it and embrace it as a learning opportunity. That means they can’t just be strategic operators; they also have to be teachers. Leaders can teach in several ways, whether that’s in large all-hands meetings or one-on-one.
“The idea is to be curious enough to go and try this new avenue to see how to do it,” Zaman says. “Regardless of your level, I think this curiosity can help you advance in your career.”
Galvin, Johansen, and Zaman are all living through change within their organizations, but these seven principles have helped them more effectively navigate it.
There’s no playbook or formula that will completely eliminate uncertainty. However, making adaptability an organizational muscle — and creating the clarity, structure, accountability, and trust necessary to build this core capability — is likely the best go-forward strategy for companies.
“Reframe change from a negative into a positive,” Johansen says. “Through the journey, no matter how short or long it is, really focus on the positives of change.”