Preparing Students to Thrive in Uncertainty

• Many business schools offer high-impact experiential learning, but few design it to strengthen students’ self-awareness or inspire behavioral change.
• Educators can adopt methods to measure student proficiency in behavioral competencies such as ambiguity tolerance and perspective-taking.
• When schools design experiential learning to incorporate repeated practice, assessment, reflection, and feedback, they push students to hone the soft skills that the job market now demands.

 
Are business schools preparing students to operate effectively in situations of uncertainty, ambiguity, and contextual novelty? Most business educators would answer “yes,” noting high-impact activities such as team projects, global collaborations, and experiential assignments. The underlying assumption is that these experiences prepare students to navigate uncertainty.

Unfortunately, this assumption is often incorrect. Exposure creates awareness, but it does not reliably produce behavioral change.

Most business schools offer educational opportunities that are action-oriented and engaging but still within most students’ comfort zones. These experiences present students with real-world situations and complexity but often do not provide them with opportunities to build self-awareness, practice specific microbehaviors, receive targeted feedback, and apply that feedback iteratively. They are not designed to develop students’ behavioral competencies.

This gap is becoming critical as reports on the future of employability point to the need for graduates to enter the workforce with durable soft skills. As artificial intelligence reshapes task-based work, employers are placing greater emphasis on how individuals interpret incomplete information, collaborate across differences, and adapt when familiar approaches no longer apply.

As we prepare our students for the future of work, we must ask a practical question: How can we teach and assess these competencies with the same level of rigor we apply to analytical skills?

Assessing Patterns, Not Tasks

Our students’ effective development requires clarity on what specific skills we want to build. My research identifies six competencies that are central to success in uncertainty or contextual novelty:

Tolerance of ambiguity: The ability to remain effective when situations are unclear, incomplete, or evolving. Individuals high in this competency move forward without full information, hold competing interpretations, and avoid drawing conclusions prematurely.

Curiosity: The drive to actively seek new information and perspectives, particularly in unfamiliar contexts. Curiosity involves exploring differences, questioning assumptions, and engaging with ideas that challenge initial expectations.

Perspective-taking: The ability to understand how others interpret situations, especially when their perceptions have been shaped by different experiences or constraints. This involves considering alternative viewpoints and incorporating them into decision-making.

Unlike technical competencies, which are demonstrated through task completion, competencies such as perspective-taking are often demonstrated through patterns of behavior.

Humility: An openness to recognizing one’s limitations and learning from others. Individuals demonstrate humility by remaining receptive to feedback, adjusting their thinking when necessary, and recognizing that their knowledge is not always complete.

Resilience: The capacity to adapt and remain effective in the face of setbacks or change. This includes recalibrating one’s approach and continuing forward under pressure.

Relationship-building: The ability to establish and sustain effective working relationships across differences by building trust, communicating clearly, and aligning with others in complex or unfamiliar contexts.

Unlike technical competencies, which are demonstrated through task completion, competencies such as tolerance of ambiguity and perspective-taking are often demonstrated through patterns of behavior across situations. These patterns can be observed and assessed, allowing educators to gather meaningful evidence for assurance of learning. Evaluation can include self-assessments, peer feedback, instructor observation, reflections, simulations, and structured rubrics tied to specific behaviors.

A Practical Shift in Teaching and Course Design

These changes do not require new courses. Rather, educators can make a few targeted design changes to experiences in existing business courses. For example, they can:

Set baselines for students to build self-awareness. Students often lack a clear understanding of their starting points across behavioral competencies. Courses can begin with self-assessments that help students identify relative strengths and weaknesses, creating baselines for focused improvement.

Design for stretch, not experience. Many experiential activities are engaging but do not consistently place students in situations that require them to navigate uncertainty. Even education abroad, which should be the gold standard for development, can become so scripted that students are not pushed toward meaningful growth. Two co-authors and I discuss this difficulty in more detail in a May 2025 article in AACSB Insights.

Experiences can be redesigned to stretch students beyond their comfort zones, not simply expose them to new situations. This includes incorporating real tasks and interactions where students must manage interpersonal complexity, ambiguity, misalignment, and incomplete information.

Define the behaviors to practice. Faculty should identify the focal competency for each experience and define the specific microbehaviors students are expected to practice. These might include seeking alternative perspectives, clarifying assumptions, or continuing to make progress without complete information.

Faculty can create a cycle of learning and feedback that allows students to practice behaviors over time, not only once.

Require reflection, feedback, and practice (again). Faculty can ensure that students engage in structured reflection after each of their experiences via activities such as in-class discussions, discussion boards, essays, and journaling. Faculty can then provide targeted, actionable feedback that students can apply in subsequent activities. This creates a cycle of practice, feedback, and reapplication across multiple experiences. The goal is for students to practice behaviors over time, not only once.

Make development visible. Using pre- and post-experience measures, along with reflection and observation, students can track their progress over time in ways that support both individual learning and instructional adjustment. The resulting data provide business schools with evidence for assurance of learning and individual students with a structured way to discuss their abilities in employment interviews.

An MBA Course Example

In an MBA course I taught recently at the D’Amore-McKim School of Business at Northeastern University in Boston, students built behavioral competencies through a deliberately structured set of experiential components. Each one was aligned to the same sequence of assessment, practice, feedback, reapplication, and reassessment. These components included:

Coaching experience. Students participated in semesterlong coaching engagements with individuals who had recently arrived in the United States. At the start of the semester, students prepared for these engagements by attending in-class sessions that focused on building foundational coaching skills, including establishing trust, asking effective questions, and clarifying expectations.

Next, students met potential mentees in a facilitated setting and selected one or two individuals to coach. The initial 90-minute interaction was intentionally unstructured, requiring students to initiate relationships, navigate uncertainty, and define expectations.

From this point, students met monthly with their mentees throughout the semester, navigating challenges related to trust-building, communication, and ambiguity. After each interaction, students reflected on situations where they effectively applied targeted competencies and where they struggled. They discussed these reflections in class and used them to guide behavioral adjustments in subsequent coaching sessions.

At the end of the semester, students submitted structured reflections analyzing how they had evolved over time, with emphasis on making specific adjustments in response to feedback.

A global team experience. Students worked on global consulting teams with peers from four countries through X-Culture, which incorporates experiences that emphasize behavioral development alongside project outcomes.

At the start of the semester, students received minimal guidance before their first team interaction, requiring them to establish roles, communication norms, and expectations independently. This instilled greater uncertainty into the experience.

Throughout the semester, student teams encountered challenges related to time zones, communication styles, and differing expectations. Students frequently discovered that responses interpreted as disengaged, controlling, passive, or inefficient by one teammate were interpreted very differently by another.

Students built behavioral competencies through experiential components aligned to the sequence of assessment, practice, feedback, reapplication, and reassessment.

These moments became focal points of development, where students had opportunities to examine assumptions, surface competing interpretations, and practice alternative responses under conditions of ambiguity. In class, students shared these critical incidents, examining breakdowns, recognizing assumptions, and identifying alternative responses.

They also received weekly peer feedback from their teammates on their contributions, leadership, and communication. These data were aggregated in class, used not only to highlight differences in perception across cultures but also to facilitate debriefs focused on team process rather than deliverables.

At the end of the semester, students reflected on how their behaviors changed within their teams, particularly in how they navigated ambiguity and responded to misalignment.

Personal learning journeys. Each student followed an individualized learning pathway focused on one competency, which promoted sustained, repeated practice of desired microbehaviors. At the start of the semester, students completed self-assessments across the six areas listed above and selected one competency for targeted focus.

During the semester, students engaged in practice-based activities tied to their selected competencies. Students were expected to demonstrate how they applied these behaviors across multiple real-life situations over time.

At the end of the course, students repeated the assessment and analyzed changes in their scores. They reflected on where they improved, where they did not, and what changes contributed to those outcomes.

In my courses, I use myGiide—a tool created by Skiilify, a public benefit corporation that I founded—to structure this process. This tool helps users rate their perceived proficiency at different competencies on a 10-point scale. Higher scores reflect greater perceived proficiency.

Self-assessments are influenced by students’ self-perceptions, so they should be treated as developmental tools rather than precise measures. Instructors could also use institutionally designed surveys, reflection prompts, peer feedback systems, structured rubrics, coaching evaluations, simulations, and other tools. The objective is to help students understand their baselines, prioritize areas to improve, and engage in repeated practice over time.

Measurable Improvements

Although students encountered different forms of uncertainty as they completed each of these experiential components, they repeatedly practiced the same underlying competencies. This meant that faculty could assess students’ development using pre- and post-activity measures, using the data from myGiide.

The results showed measurable improvement at the aggregated course level (see table below). These findings were also supported by qualitative evidence, including students’ reflections, presentations, and in-class observations.

Note: Proficiency reflects the share of students meeting or exceeding the defined threshold of 7 out of 10, while the weighted mean reflects the score distribution across the full 10-point scale.

Across the six competencies, my students demonstrated an average proficiency gain of 25 percent and an overall increase of 1.4 points on the assessment scale. The largest gains occurred in resilience and relationship-building, both of which were reinforced through sustained interaction and repeated feedback. Perspective-taking began at a high baseline and reached near full cohort proficiency.

Tolerance of ambiguity, one of the most difficult skills to build, showed meaningful improvement but remained an area for continued focus. For next semester, I will incorporate additional practice into weekly debriefs by asking students to identify real situations they found unclear or difficult to interpret. Before responding, students will document their initial explanation and generate at least two alternative explanations based on the same observations.

I will then ask them to indicate how their responses might differ under each interpretation. This will require students to practice holding multiple plausible interpretations and resisting the tendency to act on a single, immediate conclusion.

Moving From Exposure to Practice

Taken together, these results point to a clear pattern: Competencies improve most when they are practiced repeatedly and supported by targeted feedback. This suggests that behaviors can be developed when schools move beyond designing experiential learning opportunities that simply expose students to uncertainty, difference, and complexity. Instead, institutions can more purposefully design their existing global projects, teamwork, education abroad, and experiential assignments to incorporate structured practice.

The challenge for business schools is not to create more experiences. It’s to design existing experiences so that students can practice and improve behavioral competencies over time, in ways that are both assessable and visible.