The Fiction of Certainty

Earlier in my career, I thought leadership meant having the answer. Or at least looking like I did.

I prepared hard, knew my files, and assumed that if I worked enough, uncertainty would stay manageable. Then I froze in front of senior leadership. Completely blank. I got through it, but it shook something loose for me. At the time, it felt like failure. Looking back, it was the first crack in a belief I had carried for too long: that good leaders are always certain.

The older I get, the less true that feels.

At a certain level, the job stops being about having the answer and becomes much more about judgment. You are rarely choosing between right and wrong. More often, you are dealing with incomplete information, competing priorities, and real consequences.

What changed for me is not that uncertainty got easier. It is that I stopped treating it as something shameful. I am ruthlessly honest with myself. If I do not have the answer, I do not pretend that I do. If I am missing context, I admit it. If something needs more work, I say so.

With others, I try to handle that differently. Not softer in substance, but gentler in how I bring people along. In practice, that might mean naming the tension in the room before asking for a decision, or saying out loud that I am still working through something rather than arriving with false confidence. I have learned that people do not need a leader who performs certainty. They need one who can say, clearly, here is what I know, here is what I do not know yet, and here is how we are going to work through it.

That matters for decision-making, but it also matters for mental health. One of the quiet pressures in leadership is the pressure to look fine while you are still working something through. If you do that often enough, you stop being able to tell the difference between what you actually think and what you have been performing — the fiction of certainty. It also teaches everyone around you to hide their own uncertainty.

It makes them less honest.

The longer I lead, the more I believe that good leadership creates room for others to share the journey too — the pressure, the doubt, the part where the answer is still forming. That does not weaken the work.

In my experience, it is what makes the work real.

Note to reader: I’m interested in how others navigate this moment. I’ve left comments on - feel free to share but only what you’re comfortable sharing in a public forum.