Week 1: Personal Capabilities for an Era of Uncertainty

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In 2026, the conditions that once allowed leaders to plan with reasonable confidence have not merely become more challenging, they have structurally changed. The post-war architecture of international order, the multilateral institutions, the rules-based trading system, the web of bilateral agreements and regulatory frameworks that provided the scaffolding within which organisations operate, is no longer dependable. The United States has retreated from its role as guarantor of that order. Russia’s war in Ukraine has entered a new and more dangerous phase, shifting from conventional conflict to hybrid warfare across NATO’s Eastern frontier. The Middle East remains acutely volatile, with the security of global shipping routes genuinely contested. China’s strategic competition with the West is intensifying across technology, energy infrastructure, and critical minerals, reordering supply chains and investment flows in ways that are only beginning to be understood. Meanwhile, artificial intelligence is advancing at a pace that outstrips governance, and the possibility of an asset bubble correction hangs over capital markets. What has changed is not simply the scale of these challenges, but their character. They do not yield to the tools that we have used successfully in the past: regulation, negotiation, forward planning, optimised execution. They are not problems to be solved within a known system but disruptions to the system itself. That is the context in which leaders are being asked to lead.

The difficulty is not simply that the world has become more complex. It is that the older promise, namely that complexity can be mastered through sufficient knowledge, control, and design, no longer holds. This is not a marginal adjustment to how leadership is practised. It is a redefinition of what leadership is.

I. “Humility over Control”

Today, it is much more obvious that most of our problems… cannot be solved simply with more resources and greater control… Instead of trying to control or design or even understand systems, it is more important to design systems that participate as responsible, aware and robust elements… Humility over Control.

• Joichi Ito, Resisting Reduction: A Manifesto (2017)

Relinquishing control and adopting humility as a leader is a difficult proposition. It challenges one of the deepest assumptions of modern management: that with sufficient information, ability and authority, outcomes can be shaped, if not fully determined. Yet many of the systems within which leaders now operate do not behave in that way. They are not merely complicated or even genuinely complex, they are structurally different in ways that mean our tools no longer work. Cause and effect are non-linear. Interventions produce unintended consequences. Understanding is always partial and often retrospective. The future has always been unknowable, but at the moment, it feels as if it might be not just beyond our knowing, but beyond our imagination.

For leaders, the danger under these conditions is not ignorance or even lack of imagination, but false clarity: the premature reduction of complexity into something that appears manageable, a single narrative, a simplified model, a decisive plan. Such moves create the feeling of control while distorting the reality that underlies it.

To abandon the desire for control is therefore not to abandon leadership but to adopt a different attitude towards it: one that accepts the limits of knowledge, prediction, and authority. Humility, in this sense, is not modesty. It is also not a relational quality (“humble leadership” often refers to a way of being with others). Instead, it is a personal discipline, the principled refusal to reduce a situation beyond what it will bear. It requires leaders to ask what they are simplifying in order to act, what they are choosing not to see, and what it would mean to engage with a situation without forcing it into coherence. It also requires them to admit to “not knowing” in an organisational context, to bear uncertainty on behalf of their teams, their people and their organisation.

This is deeply uncomfortable work, because it removes the illusion that leadership can stand outside the system it seeks to influence. Leaders are not an external agent acting upon a system; they are within it, participating in it, shaping it, and shaped by it in turn.

II. “We Must Weigh and Measure”

The central values by which most men have lived are not always harmonious with each other… complete liberty is not compatible with complete equality… So we must weigh and measure, bargain, compromise, and prevent the crushing of one form of life by its rivals.

• Isaiah Berlin, A Message to the 21st Century (2014)

Where Ito challenges the belief that problems can be simplified, Berlin challenges the belief that they can be resolved. Leadership is sometimes framed as a moral exercise in which the leader’s principal task is identifying the right course of action. But in practice, particularly at senior levels, our choices are rarely between right and wrong. They are between competing goods, or between competing harms, or between competing rights: such as growth and sustainability, security and openness, short-term stability and long-term transformation, national interest and global responsibility.

These types of dilemmas do not lend themselves to satisfying solutions, they often are genuine zero-sum games, or ask us to prioritise an important value (such as security) over another equally important one (such as liberty). They are enduring tensions, embedded in the tasks of complex organisations and institutional life. As the CEO of a global retailer, at the current time of geopolitical uncertainty, you may have to choose between food security on one hand, and green, sustainable supply chains on the others. Not for ever, but for today. To act on one value is to constrain, and sometimes to sacrifice, another.

The language of optimisation, so prevalent in management thinking, is unhelpful here. There are no optimal solutions when values themselves are in conflict. There is only judgement, and judgement requires something that sits uneasily with the desire for certainty: the willingness to accept that one may be choosing, as Berlin implies, between forms of loss rather than between loss and gain. Judgement also requires us to make explicit the values we are acting on as leaders, which in turn means making it a priority to identify and articulate those in the first place.

This is where leadership becomes ethically serious: not in the confident assertion of values, but in the transparent weighing of them against one another and the honest recognition of what is forfeited as well as what is gained. It places a particular demand on leaders: not to eliminate conflict, but to hold it in view, to keep competing claims in productive tension rather than collapsing them into a single logical outcome.

III. “Negative Capability”

Several things dovetailed in my mind, & at once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement … I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.

• John Keats, Letter to his Brothers (1818)

If Ito asks for humility and Berlin for judgement, Keats names the underlying capacity that makes both possible.

We tend to conceive of leadership in terms of positive capabilities, such as technical skills, knowledge, people skills, execution. These matter. But as leaders become more senior, another capacity becomes increasingly central: the ability to bear not knowing. This is not ignorance, nor is it indecision. It is the disciplined refusal to resolve uncertainty before resolution is genuinely possible.

In organisational life, the pressure to reach after fact and come to reasoned conclusions is constant. It comes from colleagues, boards, markets and governments. It comes, too, from within: from the leader’s own discomfort with ambiguity, and from the social expectation that authority ought to manifest as certainty. Yet it is often precisely this irritable reaching that closes down thinking thereby converting uncertainty into overconfidence, complexity into simplification, and productive tension into hasty resolution.

Negative capability, by contrast, creates space: space for multiple interpretations, for conflicting values and for new understanding to emerge from continued exposure to difficulty rather than flight from it.

There is also a relational dimension to this capacity. Organisations project anxiety upwards; leaders are expected to absorb uncertainty and return clarity. But the task is not always to provide answers. It is, more precisely, to make uncertainty more thinkable—to contain it without denying it, and in doing so to make it acceptable for collective thought rather than a source of individual anxiety.

This is a different model of authority. It is less concerned with control than with containment, less with knowing than with enabling the conditions under which understanding might develop. It is also demanding. To remain in uncertainty without collapsing into either action or withdrawal requires both confidence and restraint, the capacity to stand, as it were, on a narrow ridge between knowing and not knowing, without being pulled down either slope.

IV. Conscience

What is needed is lively and responsible consideration of every political step, every decision; a constant stress on moral deliberation and moral judgement; continued self-examination and self-analysis; an endless rethinking of our priorities. It is not, in short, something we can simply declare or introduce. It is a way of going about things, and it demands the courage to breathe moral and spiritual motivation into everything, to seek the human dimension in all things. Science, technology, expertise, and so-called professionalism are not enough. Something more is necessary. For the sake of simplicity, it might be called spirit. Or feeling. Or conscience.

• Václav Havel, Summer Meditations (1993)

In psycho-dynamic organisational thinking, leaders are asked to distinguish carefully between what they carry as a person, what belongs to their role, and what is the proper business of the organisation. For example: is their strong reluctance to restructure a team rooted in their own personal values, or is their role not invested with the relevant decision-making powers, or is the organisational culture one that resists change? This analysis helps leaders locate themselves within a system rather than becoming unduly fused with it. But the model was designed for a world in which the boundaries of the organisation could be held relatively stable.

Uncertain times exert a different kind of pressure. When geopolitical risks, social instability, or systemic disruption start to impact the organisation’s daily tasks, those boundaries become harder to maintain, and a fourth dimension asserts itself: society. From a leadership perspective, this marks the move from leadership as an instrumental role, in which the leader is primarily accountable to the organisation and its shareholders, to an integrative one, in which the leader understands themselves as a citizen: someone for whom business is constitutively part of society, not merely operating within it, and who therefore bears co-responsibility for the problems society faces.

This is not a call for expanded strategic competence or a wider stakeholder map. Rather, it is a call for bravery, to investigate your own conscience alongside the data. The movement from the organisational to the societal requires a different personal approach to leadership, and, again, it starts with character. What the leader is able to offer at the level of society depends less on what they know and more on who they are: on their capacity to reach for their own moral compass, to articulate what they believe with clarity and conviction, and to translate that outward into the wider world (and to have the courage to change their minds when the goalposts change again). Havel names what that finally requires: not expertise, nor strategy, but spirit. Feeling. Conscience. In uncertain times, conscience is not just a backdrop to leadership. It may be its most serious demand.

Ruth Girardet is a  seasoned governance leader and executive coach with over 20 years of experience.​ As an executive and leadership coach with over twenty years of corporate experience at executive and non-executive director level, she moved into the field of leadership consulting and coaching in 2012, following an executive career in in corporate responsibility, most recently as Group CR Director for Tesco Plc and CEO of the social justice charity JustforKids Law. ​