Leading when you don’t know: the difference between putting up with it and no longer fighting it
There are two ways of meeting what you do not know. On the surface they look almost the same. In practice they lead in completely different directions.
The first way is tolerance. Putting up with the uncertainty. Gritting your teeth and getting on with it. Tolerance says: I can handle this until things become clear. It sounds mature, and it is better than panic. But tolerance has a hidden problem: it waits. It assumes the uncertainty is temporary, like bad weather that will soon pass. And while it waits, energy is spent, every day, because it costs strength to hold back something that cannot be held back.
The second way is acceptance. Ceasing to fight it. Acceptance says: this will not become clear in time – and I am going to lead anyway.
That is not giving up. It is the opposite. Someone who gives up stops acting. Acceptance starts acting, because it has stopped waiting for an answer that never comes.
Why sensible leaders choose to wait
Why is it so hard? Because acceptance feels like failing. Somewhere along the way we have learnt that a real leader knows. That not knowing is a gap in knowledge to be closed – with more analysis, more calculations, one more conversation.
Sometimes that is true. Some uncertainty can be analysed away: the answer exists, it just has to be found. How big is the market? What does the investment cost? Such things can be found out.
But that is rarely the kind of uncertainty that keeps leaders awake at night. The kind that does is about the future: how the market will turn, what the customers will choose, what happens next. That answer does not exist yet, anywhere. That uncertainty cannot be analysed away. It can only be related to. And it does not help how good the tools become. What cannot be known does not become knowable through more computing power. It only becomes more expensive to pretend.
What happens when the fight stops
Here something happens that surprises most people who experience it: when the fight against not knowing stops, the energy comes back. All the strength that went into holding back – into worrying, recalculating, waiting for clarity – is suddenly free. And it has somewhere to go, because acceptance opens a question that tolerance never got to: if I cannot know, what can I do?
Tolerance asks: when will I know? Acceptance asks: what do I do while I don’t know?
In practice: instead of calculating a fourth scenario, decide what you will do if things go up and what you will do if they go down. Two simple plans. Then act. Someone who has a plan for both outcomes no longer needs to know which one it will be.
Someone who waits to recruit until the economy is clear may wait a long time. Someone who waits to reorganise until the next budget is known may wait even longer. Someone who accepts that the answer will never become clear makes the decision on what can be known now.
One sentence to rewrite
Write down a situation where you are currently waiting for clarity before you act: “I am waiting for ___ before I ___.” Look at the first blank. Can it be found out, or will it not become clear in time?
If it is the latter: rewrite the sentence. Without knowing ___, I choose to ___. Be concrete in the second part. Not “be more flexible”, but an action, a decision, a conversation that can be done this week. Read it out loud. If it feels uncomfortable, that is a good sign.
In the book you meet an association chair who promised for seven years that the loss of members would turn around – until she stopped promising and told it as it was at the annual meeting. What happened next was not what she had expected.
The leader who manages this step does not stop being uncertain. She stops hiding that she is. And it turns out, time and again, that people do not lose confidence in a leader who says “I don’t know yet – but this is what we are going to do”. On the contrary, that is when confidence is built.
Accepting Uncertainty is the second of twelve steps in the book The Leadership Awakening – The Leader You Already Are. The same twelve steps are available as a course on en.orangize.se; the first three are free.
