Stop Waiting for Certainty. Leadership Happens Before the Answer Is Clear.

Good leaders do not eliminate uncertainty. They learn how to make sound decisions, preserve options, learn quickly, and adapt before certainty arrives

Written by: Adelee Penner

Abstract

Leaders are often expected to know.

Know what is happening.

Know what comes next.

Know which option is best.

Know enough to reassure everyone else that things are under control.

The problem is that many consequential leadership decisions occur precisely when those things cannot yet be known.

Recent research suggests that effective leadership under uncertainty does not depend on pretending uncertainty has disappeared. Instead, leaders need to distinguish what is known from what is unknowable, communicate uncertainty carefully, make sense of incomplete and sometimes contradictory signals, choose actions that preserve future options, and build feedback into decisions so that learning can alter what happens next.

The leadership question may therefore be less:

How can I be certain this is the right decision?

and more:

What do I know well enough to act on, what remains uncertain, and how will I know when it is time to adjust?

That is not indecision.

It may be one of the most disciplined forms of decision-making available to us.

There is something comforting about a leader who seems certain.

Here's what is happening.

Here's what we're going to do.

Here's how this will turn out.

Certainty can sound like competence.

It can reassure a board.

Calm a team.

Move a meeting forward.

Make a difficult decision feel manageable.

And sometimes leaders really do know.

There are technical problems where expertise matters enormously. There are established procedures. Reliable evidence. Known relationships between action and outcome. Situations where waiting for more information genuinely improves the decision.

But there is another category of leadership work.

The situations where we know something—

but not enough.

Where several interpretations remain plausible.

Where one important variable could change everything.

Where people themselves will respond to whatever decision we make.

Where technology is moving while we are planning for it.

Where an intervention changes the very system we are trying to understand.

Where the evidence we most need will not exist until after we act.

That is not an unusual leadership condition anymore.

It may be one of the defining conditions of leadership.

Sometimes "I Need More Information" Is Exactly Right

I want to be careful here.

I am not arguing that leaders should make faster decisions with less evidence.

Sometimes the responsible response is:

We don't know enough yet.

Pause.

Ask.

Investigate.

Consult.

Run the numbers again.

Talk to the people closest to the issue.

Seek expertise.

Gather more evidence.

There are unknowns that are genuinely reducible.

We simply need to do the work required to reduce them.

But there are also forms of uncertainty that cannot be resolved simply by commissioning another report.

Research on decision-making under deep uncertainty makes this distinction particularly useful. Deep uncertainty describes situations in which important probabilities, consequences, models, or future conditions cannot be confidently specified. Some uncertainty is practically reducible; other uncertainty cannot be reduced within the time available; and some is inherent in complex systems where future behaviour simply cannot be predicted precisely. (Frontiers)

That changes the decision.

Because eventually, another request for information stops being due diligence.

It becomes a way of avoiding the reality that a decision is required before certainty is available.

Leaders Are Often Rewarded for Looking More Certain Than They Are

This creates an interesting leadership problem.

We tell leaders to be transparent.

We also reward confidence.

Those two expectations do not always sit comfortably together.

Research by Løhre and Teigen (2024) examined what happens when leaders communicate uncertainty about decisions. Across a series of experiments, participants generally viewed leaders as more competent when uncertainty was described as external to the leader—"It is uncertain"—rather than internal—"I am uncertain."

The overall effect was meaningful.

Yet when participants were directly asked what leaders should do, they preferred leaders who were open about uncertainty rather than those who projected confidence and minimized it. (Sage Journals)

That contradiction fascinates me.

We say:

Be honest about what you don't know.

And then we may unconsciously penalize:

I don't know.

No wonder leaders sometimes perform certainty.

RESEARCH DEEP DIVE

How You Say "We Don't Know Yet" Matters

Løhre and Teigen's research gives us an unusually practical insight.

They distinguish between two forms of uncertainty communication.

Internal uncertainty

"I am uncertain whether this will work."

The uncertainty can be interpreted as residing in the decision-maker.

Perhaps they lack knowledge.

Perhaps they have not formed a view.

Perhaps they are unsure of themselves.

External uncertainty

"There is significant uncertainty about how the market will respond."

Now the uncertainty resides in the situation.

The environment is complex.

The outcome depends upon factors that cannot yet be observed.

The data are incomplete.

Other actors will respond in unknown ways.

Participants generally judged leaders communicating the second form as more competent. (Sage Journals)

There is a leadership lesson here, but I do not think it is:

Hide your uncertainty by blaming the environment.

It is something more disciplined.

Name the uncertainty precisely.

Instead of:

"I'm not sure."

Try:

"We have strong evidence about X. We have much less certainty about Y because customer behaviour will not become visible until implementation begins."

Instead of:

"I don't know what will happen."

Try:

"There are three conditions we cannot currently predict. Here is how we are designing the decision around them."

Instead of performing confidence, make the structure of uncertainty visible.

What do we know?

What do we not know?

Why don't we know it?

Can we find out?

When could we know?

What happens if our assumption is wrong?

That sounds very different from indecision.

It sounds like leadership.

The Opposite of Certainty Is Not Confusion

This distinction matters because uncertain environments still require coherence.

People need to understand:

What are we trying to accomplish?

What matters most?

What evidence are we using?

What constraints are real?

What assumptions are provisional?

What decision are we making now?

What are we deliberately not deciding yet?

And what could cause us to change course?

That is where sensemaking becomes useful.

A 2025 review by Eckstein, Shrestha, and Russo mapped 2,838 articles from 35 years of business and management research on sensemaking. Sensemaking has become an important lens for understanding how people and organizations interpret unfamiliar, dynamic environments and reduce the damaging effects of future unknowns. (Springer)

One feature of sensemaking is particularly relevant here.

Under imperfect information, leaders may not be able to construct a perfectly accurate account of what is happening.

They need a plausible working interpretation that is good enough to inform action—and that remains open to revision as new cues emerge. The contemporary review traces this longstanding sensemaking process: notice change, interpret cues through existing frames, construct a plausible shared account, act, and retain what is learned for future situations. (Springer)

That is an important shift.

Leadership becomes less:

Predict → decide → implement

and more:

Notice → interpret → act → observe → revise.

A Decision Can Be Good Even When the Outcome Is Bad

This may be one of the hardest lessons in leadership.

We frequently judge decisions retrospectively.

It worked.

Therefore, it was a good decision.

It failed.

Therefore, it was a bad one.

But uncertainty makes that logic unreliable.

A leader can make a poorly reasoned decision and get lucky.

Another can make a thoughtful, evidence-informed decision and encounter an unforeseeable event that produces a poor outcome.

That means leaders and boards need to distinguish between decision quality and outcome quality.

A strong decision under uncertainty should be examinable.

What evidence was available at the time?

What alternatives were considered?

Which assumptions mattered most?

What uncertainties were recognized?

Which risks were accepted?

What would have changed the decision?

Was the decision reversible?

Was an appropriate review mechanism established?

Those questions allow us to learn something.

Simply asking:

Did it work?

may not.

Some Decisions Need a Plan. Others Need a Pathway.

Research from the field of Decision Making under Deep Uncertainty is useful here, even though much of it has developed in areas such as climate policy rather than organizational leadership.

The principle translates remarkably well.

When uncertainty is relatively well characterized, a conventional predict-and-act approach may make sense.

Estimate what is most likely to happen.

Choose the optimal response.

Implement it.

But when uncertainty becomes deep, researchers argue for something different: examine multiple plausible futures, seek actions that are robust across several of them rather than optimized for one predicted future, preserve options, monitor conditions, and adapt as information changes. (Frontiers)

The emphasis shifts from:

What is the perfect decision?

to:

What decision performs reasonably well across the futures we consider plausible?

And:

What can we do now that keeps useful options available later?

That is a profoundly different leadership posture.

It replaces prediction with preparedness.

Small Moves Can Produce Information

This is where Anton Skornyakov's 2025 Harvard Business Review article becomes particularly useful.

Skornyakov argues that project leaders can manage unpredictability through vertical slicing: rather than attempting to execute an entire large-scale initiative and discovering its flaws after substantial commitment, leaders create smaller, meaningful slices that test aspects of the intended future solution. Each slice generates information that can influence what comes next. (Harvard Business Review Store)

I like the underlying logic far beyond project management.

Sometimes the best response to uncertainty is not another conversation about uncertainty.

It is a small responsible action that teaches us something.

Try it with one team.

Prototype it.

Pilot it.

Model it.

Put a minimum viable version into the environment.

Invite a small group of users.

Test one critical assumption.

Run a scenario.

Observe what actually happens.

Now we know something we could not have known from analysis alone.

That is the difference between acting recklessly and acting experimentally.

A reckless action ignores uncertainty.

An experimental action is designed around it.

Do Not Make the Decision Bigger Than It Needs to Be

Leaders sometimes make uncertain decisions unnecessarily dangerous by bundling too much together.

If we are uncertain, why commit:

• all the money,

• all the people,

• all the sites,

• all the reputation,

• all the organizational attention,

• and all the future options—

before we have learned anything?

The more uncertain the environment, the more valuable reversibility becomes.

Some decisions are doors we can walk back through.

Others lock behind us.

Those two categories deserve different decision processes.

A reversible decision may justify action with less information because the consequences can be corrected.

An irreversible or highly consequential commitment demands a much higher evidence threshold.

This is not timidity.

It is decision architecture.

Adaptive Leadership Also Means Changing How We Lead

Uncertainty does not only change what leaders decide.

It may need to change how leadership itself operates.

Thommes, Uitdewilligen, Rico, and Waller (2024) develop a model of adaptive leadership transitions in dynamic team contexts. They distinguish between situations that benefit from efficient, coordinated, relatively directive action and those that require collective sensemaking because established routines no longer fit the circumstances. (Sage Journals)

In a familiar emergency, the team may need clarity and rapid coordination.

In a genuinely novel situation, the leader may need to open the system:

• What are you seeing?

• What doesn't fit?

• Who knows something we don't?

• What assumptions are failing?

• What alternatives are emerging?

Their model emphasizes continuous monitoring and diagnosis, followed by shifts in both leader and team behaviour as the situation changes. Reflection after those shifts helps teams develop richer mental models and a larger repertoire for future adaptation. (Sage Journals)

This may be one of the hazards of uncertainty that receives too little attention.

Under pressure, leaders frequently become more controlling precisely when the situation requires more intelligence.

If the answer is already known and time is critical, direction may be valuable.

If the answer is unknown, narrowing the number of people permitted to think about it may be exactly the wrong response.

Systems Matter Because Uncertainty Rarely Lives in One Place

Recent adaptive-leadership research also points to the importance of systems thinking.

Abukalusa and Oosthuizen's 2025 work combines a systematic literature review with interviews involving experienced leaders and identifies systems thinking, future thinking, mental models, and adaptive change management as important elements of leadership in volatile and uncertain environments. Their framework explicitly connects the leader, followers, and organizational context rather than treating uncertainty as a problem for the heroic individual leader to solve alone. (Emerald)

That matters.

Because many leadership problems are uncertain, precisely because they are interconnected.

Change one part, and another responds.

Solve today's problem, and tomorrow's appears somewhere else.

Improve one outcome and discover a trade-off.

The leadership task becomes less about finding a single correct lever.

It becomes understanding relationships well enough to intervene thoughtfully.

The Two Leadership Hazards: Certainty Theatre and Analysis Paralysis

I think leaders can get caught at either end.

Certainty theatre

The leader believes credibility requires appearing sure.

Questions become threats.

Alternative interpretations sound like resistance.

Predictions harden into promises.

The plan becomes evidence of control.

And changing direction becomes politically difficult because the leader has attached identity to the original decision.

Analysis paralysis

The leader remains permanently in information-gathering mode.

Another report.

Another meeting.

Another consultation.

Another forecast.

Another month.

The assumption is that enough information will eventually eliminate the uncertainty.

Sometimes it won't.

And waiting is itself a decision.

Opportunities close.

Costs accumulate.

People stop believing anything will happen.

Neither response is particularly adaptive.

Leadership under uncertainty lives in the much harder territory between them.

Committed enough to act.

Humble enough to update.

TRY THIS IN PRACTICE

Build an Uncertainty Decision Map

Take one consequential decision currently in front of you.

Before discussing which option you prefer, work through eight questions.

1. What do we actually know?

Separate evidence from assumption.

2. What don't we know?

Name the gaps rather than allowing them to remain implicit.

3. Which unknowns are reducible?

What could we reasonably learn before making the decision?

4. Which unknowns will remain?

What will only become knowable after action—or perhaps never become fully predictable?

5. How reversible is this decision?

What would it cost to change course?

6. What is the smallest responsible action that could produce useful information?

Pilot. Prototype. Scenario. Slice. Trial.

7. What signals would tell us our assumptions are wrong?

Name them before commitment.

8. When will we revisit the decision?

Do not rely on someone remembering to question it later.

Put the review point into the decision itself.

Now, uncertainty is not merely something everyone feels.

It has become part of the decision architecture.

Tell People What Could Change Your Mind

Perhaps one of the strongest things a leader can say is:

"Here is what we know today. Based on that evidence, this is the decision I believe we should make. Here are the assumptions underneath it. And here is what would cause us to reconsider."

That statement does several things at once.

It provides direction.

It communicates reasoning.

It acknowledges uncertainty.

It identifies assumptions.

It gives people signals to monitor.

And it makes adaptation legitimate before adaptation becomes necessary.

Compare that with:

"This is the plan."

If conditions change, changing the plan can look like failure.

But if adaptation was designed into the original decision, changing course becomes evidence that the leadership process is working.

Not Knowing Is Not A Leadership Failure

Perhaps this is the idea I keep returning to.

Not knowing is not necessarily the problem.

Pretending to know can be.

Failing to investigate what can be known can be.

Refusing to act until everything is known can be.

Ignoring disconfirming evidence can be.

Making irreversible commitments too early can be.

Failing to create feedback can be.

Holding onto a decision after its assumptions have collapsed can be.

Those are leadership problems.

Uncertainty itself is simply a condition.

A condition in which leadership has to happen.

A Final Provocation

What if we stopped judging leaders by how certain they sound and started judging them by how intelligently they work with what cannot yet be known?

Did they ask the right questions?

Did they surface their assumptions?

Did they seek perspectives beyond their own?

Did they distinguish what could be learned from what could not yet be predicted?

Did they preserve options?

Did they create opportunities to test?

Did they tell people what would cause the organization to reconsider?

And when reality behaved differently than expected—

did they defend the prediction?

Or learn?

Perhaps leadership under uncertainty does not require us to see the future clearly.

Perhaps it requires something more achievable and more useful:

Know enough to act. Learn enough to adapt.

Reflective Questions

Where in your organization is uncertainty currently being treated as though more analysis will eventually make it disappear?

Where might leaders be projecting greater certainty than the available evidence justifies?

Which decisions in front of you are genuinely reversible—and which are not?

What assumptions underneath a current strategy have never been made explicit?

What could you test on a smaller scale before making a larger commitment?

When conditions change, does your organization interpret adaptation as intelligent leadership or as evidence that the original plan failed?

Are leaders making space for collective sensemaking when the problem is genuinely novel?

What information would actually change a decision you are currently considering?

And perhaps most importantly:

What do you know well enough to act on today—and how will you know when it is time to change course?

Let's talk again soon. Take good care of yourself.

Adelee

References

Abukalusa, K., & Oosthuizen, R. (2025). An adaptive organisational leadership framework through systems thinking. International Journal of Organizational Analysis, 33(8), 2673–2703. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJOA-07-2024-4635 (Emerald)

Eckstein, G., Shrestha, A., & Russo, F. (2025). Thirty-five years of sensemaking in the business & management research: A bibliometric analysis, review and discussion. Management Review Quarterly, 75, 3191–3217. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11301-024-00458-5 (Springer)

Lempert, R. J., Lawrence, J., Kopp, R. E., Haasnoot, M., Reisinger, A., Grubb, M., & Pasqualino, R. (2024). The use of decision making under deep uncertainty in the IPCC. Frontiers in Climate, 6, 1380054. https://doi.org/10.3389/fclim.2024.1380054 (Frontiers)

Løhre, E., & Teigen, K. H. (2024). When leaders disclose uncertainty: Effects of expressing internal and external uncertainty about a decision. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 77(6), 1221–1237. https://doi.org/10.1177/17470218231204350 (PubMed)

Skornyakov, A. (2025). How project leaders can tame unpredictability. Harvard Business Review, 103(1), 124–127. Harvard Business Review article

Thommes, M. S., Uitdewilligen, S., Rico, R., & Waller, M. J. (2024). Switching gears: How teams co-construct adaptive leadership style transitions in dynamic contexts. Organizational Psychology Review, 14(4), 542–570. https://doi.org/10.1177/20413866231214238 (Sage Journals)