Something shifts after a while in leadership.

Not your tolerance for complexity – that tends to grow. What shifts is the relationship to not-knowing. Early on, uncertainty feels like a problem to be solved. Later, you begin to recognise it as information. The question changes from what does this mean? to is it time to know yet?

That distinction matters more now than it may have at any other point in recent memory.

We are living through a period that generates more signals than settled meaning. Artificial intelligence, geopolitical realignment, economic patterns that resist stable interpretation — none of this arrives quietly. Each development travels with commentary insisting that the moment is decisive, that we should already understand it, that positioning our organisations is a matter of urgency.

And so we interpret. Quickly, often. Because that is what is expected.

But there is a quieter risk in speed that we don’t always name.

When we interpret too early, we don’t simply get it wrong. We foreclose something. We stop being responsive to what the system is still trying to show us. Organisational narratives settle while the underlying pattern is still forming, and we find ourselves leading from an explanation that the situation has already moved beyond.

Complex systems have their own sequence. Signals accumulate first. Patterns stabilise later. Meaning becomes visible last. That sequence cannot be hurried, and the pressure to shortcut it — however understandable — tends to produce coherence at the cost of accuracy.

What appears unstable may simply be unresolved.

There is also something worth understanding about ourselves here. The pull toward certainty isn’t only intellectual. When ambiguity increases, the mind prefers a rapid answer over a sustained question. We search for explanations that restore a sense of coherence — not always because the moment demands it, but because uncertainty is uncomfortable to inhabit for long.

Knowing that doesn’t make us immune to it. But it creates a little room.

Room to ask whether what we’re experiencing is genuine instability, or a system in the process of reorganising itself. Those two things can look identical from the inside. The difference is that one calls for intervention and the other calls for observation — and mistaking one for the other carries real cost.

Some of you will know the concept of antifragility — the idea that what initially looks volatile can prove to be the very mechanism through which systems strengthen. Disruption isn’t always disorder. It is sometimes how adaptation happens. The question is whether we can remain present to that possibility without collapsing the uncertainty before it has had time to resolve.

That’s what I’d call provisional certainty. Not paralysis, and not false confidence. The capacity to act — because we must, organisations cannot wait indefinitely for clarity — while holding our interpretation lightly enough to remain responsive to what continues to emerge.

It is a different kind of leadership discipline. Less about explanation, more about attention. Less about arriving at meaning and more about staying close to what the situation is actually doing.

We are not always going to get the timing right. But the practice of asking the question feels important.

Is what we are seeing instability — or the early stages of a pattern still forming?