Ambiguity isn’t an edge case for most leaders. It’s a defining feature of the environment they’re being asked to lead through. Here’s how a purpose-built leadership game helped leaders practise judgement, empathy and decision-making under real-world uncertainty.

Healius is an Australian pathology brand, processing millions of tests each year to support clinical decision-making nationwide.

Over the past few years, the organisation has faced sustained, compounding change, including the COVID-19 pandemic, intensifying competition, regulatory shifts and rising cost pressures. T27 – the company’s strategic plan – emerged as the blueprint for sustainable profitability, designed to sharpen focus and reduce distraction amid growing complexity.

But strategic clarity doesn’t remove execution risk. In a constantly shifting system, progress depends on leaders navigating trade-offs and acting without full information. These are capabilities most leaders are still building – and that’s precisely where the development focus needed to be.

This points to a clear insight: to lead with agility through ambiguity, leaders need to have experienced it – safely, and before the consequences are real.

Operating through ambiguity

Pathology is a high-volume, low-margin model. Performance is highly sensitive to even small changes in price or volume. With 99 per cent of pathology bulk billed, Medicare funding or criteria changes can force leaders to rethink cost structures, workforce models and service delivery.

Customer expectations shift rapidly, shaped by digital platforms that normalise speed, transparency and choice. Leaders were balancing these rising service expectations against cost, risk and the reality that capability and culture don’t change overnight.

The COVID-19 pandemic drove an extraordinary surge in testing demand, requiring rapid scale-up of capacity and workforce, before conditions reversed just as quickly.

More broadly, these drivers highlight the need for Healius leaders to lead under uncertainty – a reality all businesses are familiar with in this current business climate.

“This is the environment we are operating in every day. Ambiguity, trade-offs and imperfect information are increasingly part of the job – not the exception – and our leaders are developing the capability to read the signals, make the call and move forward – without waiting for certainty that may never come,” says Paula Bayliss, Group Executive People & Culture at Healius.

Capabilities to lead through ambiguity

In this environment, two leadership capabilities become essential: adaptive leadership and empathy.

Adaptive leadership is the ability to reason and act in grey zones – to stay coherent as conditions change and make calls without full information.

Empathy provides the anchor. In a complex, interconnected organisation such as Healius, leaders need to recognise their decisions rarely stand alone. Understanding the pressures, constraints and trade-offs faced by colleagues across the business leads to better decisions, stronger trust and fewer unintended consequences.

Together, these capabilities enable decisive action without losing system-wide perspective.

This idea is well-established in leadership thinking. Frameworks such as VUCA and Cynefin are commonly used to describe environments where conditions are volatile, uncertain and interconnected, and where linear planning breaks down. This perspective is also reinforced by skills-based development research from the Australian HR Institute, which highlights adaptability, judgement and collaboration as increasingly critical capabilities.

“The reality is that leaders don’t often get to practise these skills safely,” says Bayliss. “Most of the time, they’re making decisions within their own function, and the real trade-offs only show up when decisions collide across the organisation. That’s when the risk is highest – and it’s also the hardest place to learn.”

“Ambiguity, trade-offs and imperfect information are increasingly part of the job – not the exception – and our leaders are developing the capability to read the signals, make the call and move forward – without waiting for certainty that may never come.” – Paula Bayliss, Group Executive People & Culture, Healius.

Learning through play and experimentation

Play provides a safe rehearsal ground, allowing leaders to test hypotheses while navigating ambiguity.

Dietrich’s work on creativity (2004) highlights that playful states encourage exploratory thinking – testing ideas, observing outcomes and refining mental models. This is particularly valuable when information is incomplete or conditions are shifting.

More recent studies in organisational and leadership contexts reinforce these effects. Research by Shen (2023) and Schijven and Kikkawa (2024) proposes that game-based and playful environments increase cognitive flexibility, adaptive problem-solving and resilience by allowing leaders to experience disruption, recover from setbacks and continue operating under pressure.

Again, this aligns with AHRI’s skills-based research: as adaptability, judgement and collaboration become more critical, explanation alone is no longer enough. Play allows leaders to rehearse judgement and trade-offs in realistic conditions, before the consequences are real.

A game of strategy and uncertainty

To help leaders build this capability in practice, I worked with Helius to develop a leadership game. Played on a board with tokens, cards and dice – much like childhood favourites such as Monopoly or Snakes and Ladders – the experience was purpose-built to mirror Healius own business environment – its pressures, constraints and competing priorities.

Teams began by setting a strategy, then executing and adapting it as the game unfolded. Dice rolls introduced topical real-world curveballs: cyber incidents, rostering disruptions, regulatory audits, contract bids, talent poaching and sudden shifts in demand. As conditions changed, teams were forced to reassess priorities, reallocate resources and make decisions with imperfect information.

As play progressed, participants encountered the same strategic tensions they face in the real world: efficiency versus growth, investment in ways of working versus direct business impact, team needs versus customer expectations, and price versus volume. Information was incomplete, and the decisions made by each team shaped not only their own path, but the conditions faced by competitors in real time.

“It surprised me how quickly the conversations sounded like our real leadership discussions. The same tensions, the difficult trade-offs, the same moments where there isn’t a clear answer.”

Learning in action

The deepest learning emerged as leaders experienced uncertainty together, with unscripted decisions revealing biases, capability gaps and behavioural patterns under pressure.

One team developed a clear, differentiated strategy, identifying strategic levers others missed and pursuing creative, commercially sound growth This theoretically strong strategy proved fragile, as underinvestment in people, capability and ways of working left the team exposed.

Pathologists were repeatedly poached, execution suffered, and momentum stalled. The case surfaced a familiar bias: underestimating the role of less visible organisational infrastructure required to sustain performance. This demonstrated that even strong strategies will fail without a stable, engaged and capable team.

Another team had a participant arrive late after their flight was delayed due to bad weather. They spent the rest of the day catching up – trying to interpret decisions already in motion and find ways to contribute. It highlighted a critical reality: when people don’t have shared context, they struggle to contribute meaningfully. Under pressure, those gaps don’t just slow individuals – they narrow perspectives at exactly the moment better judgement is needed. The experience also sparked a useful discussion about what the team could have done to better bring their new teammate up to speed and create that shared context.

“What struck me was that most of the ‘aha’ moments weren’t new. We talk about these ideas often – in training, in town halls, in the narrative we share with the business. The difference was the game. Experiencing the trade-offs under pressure meant participants didn’t just hear the message again – they finally felt it.”

Impact and outcomes

Impact was assessed using pre- and post-measures and participant feedback, focusing on commercial and financial acumen and comfort with uncertainty.

The quantitative shifts were material. Participants reported a 25 per cent uplift in feeling equipped to identify and respond to emerging risks and opportunities, alongside a 21 per cent uplift in confidence speaking the language of the business. The Net Promoter Score of +93 reflected the power of a shared, game-based experience to break down barriers, connect leaders and embed insights.

Leaders described greater confidence navigating commercial and financial trade-offs, and a clearer understanding of the executive team’s balancing act by experiencing the T27 strategic plan in action.

“You could see the increase in confidence across the group, but it came with a healthy appreciation of uncertainty and the gaps they still need to close. That combination of confidence and humility is exactly what good leadership development should produce.”

Implications for People & Culture leaders

The Healius experience points to a broader shift in how leadership capability can be built. In environments defined by ambiguity and high-stakes trade-offs, strategic judgement is accelerated through experience.

As the nature of work shifts, AI is increasingly automating technical and transactional tasks. The differentiating value of leaders shifts toward adaptability, creativity, collaboration and judgement under uncertainty. These inherently human capabilities are best shaped through practice.

Play-based experiences can be a powerful way to develop these capabilities – but they have the greatest impact when they are purposeful and co-created with leaders from the business. When game mechanics mirror the business system, leaders can move freely through the experience, confident that the insights translate to the real world.

Looking ahead

T27 set a clear strategic direction for Healius. In bringing the strategy to life through play, Healius took the next step: moving beyond communicating T27 to actively building the leadership capability required to execute it.

By creating a game – and giving leaders the space and freedom to explore it – provided something traditional strategy rollouts rarely deliver: the lived experience of executing the strategic blueprint in an environment defined by change, trade-offs and uncertainty.

For Healius leaders, T27 now means something different. It is no longer simply a plan to rally their teams around, but one they can navigate, test and adapt in real-time, building the confidence and judgement required to lead as the strategic plan comes to life. Even the most well-crafted strategy depends on leaders stepping confidently onto the board, making their moves and learning to play.

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Ilan Gutman is a management consultant and founder of Guided Minds. A builder at heart, he’s obsessed with making development count – turning ideas, technology and a healthy dose of curiosity into experiences that change how people think and work.

Disclosure: Healius is a client of Ilan Gutman’s. This article should not be read as an endorsement of this product.