Field Note #3: Who is carrying the uncertainty?

Over the years, I’ve learnt to trust my recurring observations before I can explain them.

This week, two seemingly unrelated coaching conversations kept colliding in my mind, but it took me a while to understand why.

The first was with a senior leader navigating an internal recruitment process that had become incredibly drawn out and increasingly ambiguous. Rather than talking about whether she wanted the role, we found ourselves exploring the burden she had been left carrying. The organisation had decisions to make about whether the role would even go ahead and who should fill it. While they were deciding, she was left trying to interpret what the delays meant, deciding how patient to be, wondering where her responsibility ended, and theirs began.

A few days later, I had a conversation with a leader stepping up into greater organisational responsibility. As we talked about what that step might involve, we kept circling back to something less obvious than the role or remit. With greater responsibility, there is often a subtle shift in what should be carried by the leader. Decisions that haven’t been made still shape behaviour. Questions that haven’t been answered don’t disappear; they settle somewhere. It wasn’t framed as a problem at the time, more an observation that something was being held and managed day to day, even if it wasn’t entirely clear by whom or why.

The conversations felt completely unrelated at the time.

It was only afterwards that I realised I’d left both of them thinking about the same question.

Who is carrying the uncertainty?

We spend a lot of time talking about uncertainty as though it’s a feature of organisational life. We encourage leaders to become more comfortable with ambiguity, to make decisions with incomplete information and to lead through change. All of that matters, but I’m beginning to wonder whether there’s a new angle worth looking at.

I’ve found myself thinking less about uncertainty itself, and more about what actually happens to it inside an organisation.

It doesn’t disappear because a decision is delayed. It doesn’t disappear because difficult conversations are avoided. It doesn’t disappear when leaders decide not to acknowledge it. My observation is that uncertainty has a habit of settling somewhere, although not always where it naturally belongs.

But what happens when uncertainty ends up in the wrong place?

I’ve often said that, in the absence of information, people fill the vacuum with their own interpretation. Until this week I’d mostly thought about that as a communication issue. Now I’m wondering whether communication is only part of the story. Perhaps it starts much earlier, with where uncertainty settles in the first place.

Once uncertainty settles somewhere, people don’t leave it alone. They start making sense of it. They join the dots. They test explanations. Before long, they have a story that feels plausible, and they begin making decisions based on it.

Perhaps that’s why two conversations that looked so different kept colliding in my mind. One leader was left carrying uncertainty that belonged to the organisation. The other was carrying uncertainty that, at least in part, belonged somewhere else. Different situations, but the same underlying question.

I’m not sure where this idea goes yet.

I do know I’ll be paying much closer attention to where uncertainty sits, how it got there, and what happens when the people best placed to do something useful with it are not the ones carrying it.