New APA data shows uncertainty is narrowing how leaders think. Here’s how category strategy restores focus, confidence and a sense of agency.
Key takeaways: New 2026 data from the American Psychological Association shows Americans increasingly stressed about money, the economy and their jobs, and nearly one in five have stopped planning for the future. Research on scarcity shows that this kind of pressure narrows attention, which pushes leaders toward defensive tactics and away from strategy. Category strategy widens the view again: by identifying a market position no one else has claimed, it gives organizations hope, confidence and a sense of agency without waiting for certainty.
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There's a great little outdoor gear atelier in Victor, Idaho, called Needle & Shred. Part sewing shop, part snowboard shop, it specializes in repairing and renewing outdoor gear.
It's an artifact of ski-town ideals: a cottage industry tucked into a nook of a converted garage workshop. Blown zipper? Torn softshell from tree skiing? Ripped seams? For twenty bucks or so, a favorite piece of gear gets a new lease on life.
When the first snow hits the peaks and people start digging through their gear closets, business picks up. Like snow tires, repairs follow the seasons.
But this year is different. Basic repairs that once took a week now take two or more. And the rush hasn't let up.
The owner attributes the sustained demand partly to economic anxiety, as people look to extend the life of what they already own, and partly to the changing socioeconomic character of Teton Valley.
Or, as he put it, "Man, people are feeling squeezed."
In October 2026 the American Psychological Association (APA) released its 2026 Stress in America report and put some numbers behind that sentiment. According to the survey:
The consequences extend beyond anxiety.
According to the APA, more than half of U.S. adults (51%) feel too emotionally drained to stay engaged with everything happening around them. Nearly half (47%) have withdrawn from some form of social participation. More than a quarter (28%) feel they have little or no control over their future, up from 23% in 2025.
And 26% have put their futures on hold, including 17% who say they've stopped planning for the future altogether.
Nearly one in five Americans have stopped planning for the future.
The workplace isn't providing much relief. The APA's 2026 Work in America survey of 2,009 employed adults documents a parallel set of pressures:
These are separate surveys of different populations. But together they describe an environment in which uncertainty extends from household finances to professional livelihoods.
Which raises a question for business leaders.
If uncertainty is eroding people's confidence in their ability to influence the future, what can organizations do to restore it?
Behavioral scientists Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir, authors of Scarcity (2013), identified a phenomenon they call tunneling.
Their research on scarcity demonstrates how immediate needs can consume our attention, leaving less mental bandwidth for other considerations.
And for good reason.
When you're living paycheck to paycheck, a failed investment or unexpected expense can have devastating consequences. Protecting what you have isn't a failure of imagination. It's a rational response to having little margin for error.
Business leaders face very different circumstances. But the research raises a relevant question: What happens to strategic thinking when leaders become consumed by immediate threats?
When people are consumed by uncertainty, they can become more concerned with protecting the present than creating the future.
In business, that creates the risk of strategic myopia.
Leaders turn inward. Defend revenue. Cut costs. Improve efficiency. Watch competitors. Get more out of what they already have.
None of these are inherently bad decisions. Some may be essential, but when leaders feel stuck, tactics become a seductive salve.
A new website. A better marketing campaign. An AI initiative.
Tangible projects with budgets, timelines, and deliverables. A plan that creates a sense of purpose and progress.
But progress toward what?
Tactics can improve how effectively we compete without questioning what we're competing for.
The more uncertain the future becomes, the more important it is to look outward. To escape the tunneling reflex.
Toward changing customer needs, unsolved problems, and market positions competitors have overlooked. Toward what's missing in the market.
A new website asks how to better communicate what a company already does. Strategy asks whether what the company does—and how customers understand its value—is the right basis for competing in the first place.
It challenges the assumptions that keep organizations focused on improving the business they have rather than imagining the business they could become.
In October, 2026, we presented a category strategy to a client: a financial services firm.
At the reveal slide, there was an audible gasp from the room that could be heard over Zoom. As any consultant will attest, this is a stressful moment in itself. The gasp means you've either nailed it or totally whiffed.
Fortunately, this was the former.
We hadn't introduced revolutionary AI technology or proposed an elaborate new business model. We had identified a market position nobody else had claimed and developed the language to communicate it.
Suddenly, the company had a different way to explain what it did, why it mattered, and why customers should care.
What had previously been difficult to articulate became a compelling opportunity. The client could see a position in the market it hadn't previously recognized and a path toward owning it.
The future hadn't become more predictable. But the company's ability to influence it now seemed more tangible and accessible.
Uncertainty makes us look inward for answers. Strategy gives us a reason to look outward for opportunity.
There's an interesting finding in the APA's Work in America research that helps explain why this matters.
The survey measured Psychological Capital, or PsyCap, a concept developed by organizational psychologist Fred Luthans. PsyCap combines four related psychological capacities: hope, efficacy, resilience, and optimism (HERO).
PsyCap is associated with how people experience work, respond to challenges, and perform. The APA describes it as a renewable psychological resource.
And the differences between workers with relatively high and low PsyCap are striking. According to the APA's 2026 Work in America survey:
These findings don't establish that PsyCap causes those differences. But they suggest that psychological resources matter to how people experience uncertainty and their capacity to respond to it.
Consider what happened in that client presentation.
We hadn't eliminated any uncertainty. We had given the room something it hadn't walked in with: a credible reason to believe in a different future.
And consider what good strategy can contribute to the four dimensions of PsyCap:
Strategy doesn't automatically create psychological capital. But it can give those capacities something to organize around.
It can help restore something uncertainty steadily erodes: a sense of agency.
We tend to think of strategy as a plan for achieving business objectives.
But perhaps its more important contribution, particularly in uncertain times, is giving people a clear understanding of the opportunity ahead, a reason to believe it's worth pursuing, and a coherent set of choices about how to pursue it: Agency.
It replaces an endless universe of possible responses with a deliberate course of action. It tells people what matters, what doesn't, and why.
Of course, the gasp in the conference room doesn't create a market. The strategy has to be translated into products, positioning, customer experiences, investment decisions, and countless acts of organizational alignment and commitment.
Confidence without action is just optimism (which has value), but execution without strategy is activity, and activity is what organizations retreat into when they don't know what else to do.
The real value of strategy is that it makes action aligned and purposeful. Each decision and each accomplishment becomes evidence that the organization is moving toward something rather than simply reacting to everything.
So before committing to another initiative, ask yourself: Are we investing in the future we want to create, or defending the business we already have?
If the answer is the latter, the most important thing you can do isn't another…thing. It's to look beyond the pressures of the present and identify an opportunity worth pursuing.
What is category strategy? Category strategy is the discipline of choosing the market category a company competes in, and then claiming it, so customers see the company as the obvious first choice. It decides whether to lead an existing category, reframe it, or design a new one.
What's the difference between category strategy and category design? Category design is one form of category strategy: creating a new category and becoming its leader. Category strategy is the broader decision about where to compete, which may or may not mean creating a new category.
How does uncertainty affect business strategy? Research on scarcity by Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir shows that pressure narrows attention, a pattern they call tunneling. For leaders, that often looks like strategic myopia: cutting costs, defending revenue and launching tactical projects instead of asking whether the company is competing on the right basis.
What is psychological capital (PsyCap) at work? Psychological capital, or PsyCap, combines four capacities: hope, efficacy, resilience and optimism (HERO). The APA's 2026 Work in America survey found that workers with high PsyCap were far less likely to fear job loss or AI-driven obsolescence than workers with low PsyCap.
How can strategy help organizations in uncertain times? Strategy can't remove uncertainty, but it can restore agency. A clear category strategy identifies an opportunity worth pursuing, gives people reasons to believe they can win it, and replaces scattered tactics with a deliberate course of action.
Mike Geraci is the founder of DRMG, a category strategy firm that helps founders and CMOs identify and claim market positions no one else holds. He has more than 25 years of experience in strategic communications, positioning and brand strategy, working with national brands, mission-driven lenders and civic organizations. He is based in Teton Valley, Idaho.
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