Learning to Stay in the Uncertainty

A mentor of mine posted something this morning that stopped me.

It was a passage adapted from Richard Rohr’s Everything Belongs, and one part in particular stayed with me:

“Ask yourself regularly, ‘What am I afraid of? Does it matter? Will it matter in the great scheme of things? Is it worth holding on to?’”

Rohr goes on to write about our tendency to manufacture answers because uncertainty makes us uncomfortable. We want to settle the dust, remove the anxiety, and restore some sense of order as quickly as possible. His argument is that faith often requires something very different. It requires us to remain in the uncertainty long enough to stop trying to control it.

Something moved in me when I read that because it put language around a tension I have been writing about for years.

We are uncomfortable with not knowing.

That sounds obvious, but I think it explains a great deal about how people respond to pressure, particularly in leadership. When circumstances become uncertain, our instinct is usually to resolve the uncertainty as quickly as possible. We gather information, make a decision, establish a plan, communicate direction, and start moving.

That is often exactly what leadership requires.

The problem comes when our need to make a decision becomes stronger than our need to make the right decision.

There is a difference.

I have spent much of my adult life in environments where indecision carried real consequences. Military command, healthcare, executive leadership, and crisis response do not generally reward leaders who become paralyzed every time the information is incomplete. There are moments when you simply have to act.

But incomplete information and insufficient thought are not the same thing.

Some of the worst decisions I have watched leaders make were not caused by a lack of intelligence, experience, or even good intentions. They happened because the leader could not tolerate the uncertainty long enough to understand what was actually happening.

They needed an answer.

They needed movement.

They needed to feel as though they had regained control.

And sometimes that need became more important than the decision itself.

That is what Rohr’s words brought back to me this morning.

“We mustn’t engineer an answer too quickly.”

There is something profoundly uncomfortable about that sentence because leadership culture tends to reward decisiveness. We celebrate leaders who act quickly, take charge, make the call, and move the organization forward. Those qualities matter, particularly when circumstances demand them.

But decisiveness is not the same thing as speed.

Some decisions require immediate action. Others only feel urgent because uncertainty is creating anxiety.

Learning to distinguish between the two is one of the harder things I have learned about leadership.

On September 11, 2001, I watched this firsthand.

Like everyone else, we were trying to understand something that initially made very little sense. Information was incomplete, events were unfolding quickly, emotion was understandably high, and nobody had the luxury of knowing how the next several hours would develop.

What stayed with me was not frantic activity.

It was restraint.

There was presence. There was deliberate attention to what was actually known and what was not. There was an understanding that the gravity of the moment did not give us permission to invent certainty where certainty did not yet exist.

That distinction has stayed with me for more than two decades.

There are times when urgency is real and hesitation becomes dangerous. There are also times when the emotional intensity of a situation creates an artificial sense that something must be done immediately, even when waiting for another piece of information, another perspective, or simply another few minutes of thought would produce a much better decision.

The pressure to act can become its own form of fear.

Fear of appearing indecisive.

Fear of being wrong.

Fear of losing control.

Fear that someone else will believe we do not know what we are doing.

Fear of the silence that exists between recognizing a problem and knowing how to solve it.

That last one is particularly difficult for leaders because people expect leaders to provide answers. Eventually we begin expecting the same thing from ourselves.

Someone walks into your office with a problem and you want to solve it.

A crisis develops and you want to establish direction.

An organization becomes unstable and you want to create certainty.

A career suddenly changes and you want to know exactly what comes next.

A relationship becomes difficult and you want resolution.

Something does not make sense, and we immediately start trying to make it make sense.

Sometimes that instinct serves us well.

Sometimes it causes us to manufacture an answer simply because an answer feels better than uncertainty.

I have probably done both more times than I can remember.

Experience has taught me that there are moments when the most disciplined thing a leader can do is resist the pressure to prematurely resolve the situation.

That does not mean doing nothing.

It means paying attention before acting.

It means asking what is actually known rather than filling gaps with assumptions. It means listening to the people closest to the problem without rushing them toward the conclusion you already prefer. It means recognizing when your own anxiety, ambition, ego, or fear is starting to influence the decision.

Most importantly, it means becoming comfortable enough with ambiguity that you do not need certainty in order to remain steady.

I think that is where the spiritual dimension of Rohr’s writing becomes especially meaningful.

Faith does not always provide immediate answers.

Sometimes faith is precisely what allows us to live without them.

There is a temptation to think of faith as certainty, but much of faith seems to involve exactly the opposite. It requires trust when the outcome is not visible, patience when the path is not clear, and a willingness to remain in what Rohr calls the “River of Mystery” without demanding that everything become understandable on our timetable.

Leadership often asks something similar.

You still have responsibility.

You still have to show up.

People may still be looking to you.

Eventually, you may still have to make the decision.

But you do not always have to eliminate the uncertainty first.

That is a very different kind of confidence.

It is easy to appear confident when you have complete information, clear alternatives, and an obvious answer. The harder test comes when none of those things exist and you still have to remain grounded enough not to create false certainty for yourself or everyone around you.

I have come to believe that this is one of the distinctions between experienced leadership and merely experienced decision-making.

The mature leader does not necessarily know more.

Sometimes the mature leader is simply more comfortable admitting what is not yet known.

That leader can say, “I do not know yet,” without feeling diminished by it. They can hold competing possibilities in their mind without immediately choosing one simply to end the tension. They can listen longer. They can allow new information to change their understanding without interpreting that change as weakness.

Most importantly, they can distinguish between the discomfort of uncertainty and the existence of actual danger.

Those two things feel remarkably similar when you are standing inside them.

Rohr asks, “What am I afraid of? Does it matter? Will it matter in the great scheme of things? Is it worth holding on to?”

Those are not bad leadership questions either.

What am I actually afraid of in this moment?

Am I afraid of the consequence of waiting, or am I afraid of how waiting makes me feel?

Am I trying to solve the problem, or am I trying to relieve my own anxiety?

Am I making this decision because the situation requires it, or because I need to feel back in control?

Would another hour, another conversation, another perspective, or simply a little quiet change what I see?

Those questions require enough self-awareness to recognize that sometimes the greatest pressure in a decision is coming from inside us.

That is not weakness. It is part of the responsibility.

I have spent years writing and thinking about leadership under pressure, but what struck me this morning is how much of that conversation is really about our relationship with uncertainty.

We spend enormous amounts of time teaching leaders how to make decisions.

Maybe we should spend more time teaching them how to sit with a decision before making one.

Not indefinitely. Not irresponsibly. Not when circumstances genuinely demand immediate action.

Just long enough to make sure we are responding to the situation rather than escaping the discomfort it creates.

There is a kind of discipline in that pause.

There is also humility.

It is the recognition that we do not control everything, understand everything, or always know what comes next. We can still lead without pretending otherwise.

Maybe that is part of what faith and leadership have in common.

Neither promises that the road ahead will always be clear.

Both ask us to keep moving anyway.

And sometimes the most important thing we can do before taking that next step is remain in the uncertainty long enough to understand why we are so desperate to leave it.

Thanks, Bob.

Or, as I have known him much longer:

Mr. Jones.