Field Manual Part 4: How to Lead Well When Uncertainty Keeps Coming

The stories told about great leadership are almost always about a decisive moment. The pivot. The bold call. The burning building. That makes for a great story. But it isn't the full story.

Many leadership failures don't happen in explosions. They happen in fog. Slow-moving, months-long, soul-grinding fog. The market shifts gradually. The board sends mixed signals. A transformation drags on. A merger integration never quite stabilises. The technology landscape evolves faster than your operating model.

And in that fog, not in a crisis, many capable leaders quietly unravel.

The defining leadership capacity of the next decade may not be boldness, charisma, or even intelligence. It may be something quieter: the ability to function well under sustained ambiguity. Not for hours. For months.

Why ambiguity feels unbearable

Psychologists have studied something called tolerance for ambiguity for decades. Some people can hold uncertainty without rushing to resolve it. Others feel a strong compulsion to close the gap and get to an answer, any answer, even if it means oversimplifying a complex situation too early.

That compulsion has a name: the need for cognitive closure. It's the desire for firm answers, stable categories, definite conclusions.

In stable environments, moving fast is a genuine advantage. In complex ones, it's where the expensive mistakes live.

Here's the practical version: a leader with low ambiguity tolerance will often restructure before they've listened. They'll escalate commitment to an early decision because reversing course feels like weakness. They'll narrow options not because the strategy demands it, but because the discomfort demands it.

It looks like decisiveness. It functions like a blind spot.

What ambiguity actually does to you

This isn't just a mindset issue. It's physiological.

When stakes are high and outcomes are unclear, the brain makes a rapid assessment: do I have what it takes to handle this, or am I overwhelmed?

Researchers call this challenge versus threat appraisal. The distinction matters enormously, because the two states produce measurably different physiological responses.

In a challenge state, your cardiovascular system operates efficiently. You stay cognitively flexible. You think expansively.

In a threat state, the opposite happens. Blood vessels constrict. Cognitive range narrows. The mind starts seeking familiar patterns and returning to old playbooks, not because they're right, but because they're safe.

Under threat, we narrow. Under challenge, we expand.

The critical insight is that appraisal comes before physiology. How you interpret ambiguity shapes how your body responds. How your body responds shapes how you think. And in sustained ambiguity, this cycle repeats every single day.

The suppression trap

When leaders feel this internal pressure, most do what the culture trained them to do: they suppress it.

They push the anxiety down. They project calm. They perform composure.

This looks like strength. The data say otherwise.

Suppression is consistently associated with higher burnout, poorer wellbeing, and worse relational outcomes. It costs cognitive resources to maintain. And it doesn't make the anxiety go away. It just relocates it, often into irritability, impatience, or an unconscious need to control things that feel controllable.

The alternative is something called cognitive reappraisal, and it's one of the more robustly supported findings in this space. Instead of suppressing the internal experience, you reframe it. Uncertainty becomes a signal that you're operating at the edge of something meaningful, not evidence that you're failing. The ambiguity is temporary, manageable, and navigable.

That's not positive thinking. It's a trainable skill. And it changes the physiological response, which changes the cognitive capacity available to you.

Why this matters more over time, not less

Most leadership research focuses on acute stress: exams, accidents, financial shocks. But senior leadership doesn't look like an acute spike. It looks like chronic exposure.

Digital transformation is not a three-day crisis. AI adoption is not a one-week event. Post-merger integration, regulatory shifts, cultural change programmes: these are extended states of not-knowing.

Research on chronic versus acute stress shows something important here. In acute situations, the environment dominates. Everyone's under pressure and the situation drives behaviour. But in chronic situations, individual differences start to matter more.

In other words, over months and years, your regulatory habits are amplified.

This is why the same leader can look sharp in a crisis and brittle in a prolonged transformation. Crisis is a great equaliser. Sustained ambiguity is a differentiator.

The cognitive cost no one talks about

There's a second-order effect worth naming directly.

Under sustained threat, cognitive flexibility erodes. The ability to hold multiple perspectives simultaneously, to weigh competing information without defaulting to a single frame, starts to collapse.

This isn't a character flaw. It's a predictable response to an overloaded system seeking simplicity.

But here's why it matters at a leadership level: the executives who make poor strategic calls in complex environments are often not lacking in intelligence or experience. They're lacking in available cognitive range. The sustained ambiguity has slowly narrowed their thinking, and they can no longer see what they can no longer see.

Emotional regulation doesn't just protect your wellbeing. It protects your thinking.

What this looks like in practice

Low capacity under sustained ambiguity rarely announces itself. It seeps in:

• Irritability that gets framed as urgency

• Escalating demands on teams for certainty that doesn't exist

• Reduced appetite for dissent or challenge

• Over-reliance on what worked in the last company, the last role, the last cycle

• A creeping preference for familiar options over genuinely exploratory ones

  
  

High capacity looks different. It's not drama-free, it's drama-managed:

• A visible distinction between internal anxiety and external behaviour

• The ability to hold provisional positions without performing false confidence

• Continued curiosity and exploration before commitment

• Relational steadiness that keeps team psychological safety intact

• Framing uncertainty as challenge rather than catastrophe

  
  

None of this is heroic. It doesn't make for good memoirs. But it is what separates organisations that adapt from those that contract.

The question boards aren't asking

Corporate culture rewards decisiveness. Boards like clarity. Investors prefer certainty.

So we've built hiring processes that screen for people who can project confidence and answer every question. Which means we've accidentally screened for premature closure.

A leader who rapidly simplifies a complex situation looks strong in an interview. Over three years of transformation, that same simplification instinct can become the thing that limits the organisation.

The question worth adding to every senior hire evaluation isn't just: "Has this person done the job before?"

It's: "How do they behave when certainty never comes?"

Can you build this capacity?

Yes. That's the most practically useful thing the research says.

These aren't fixed personality traits. They're trainable mechanisms.

Ambiguity tolerance shifts with experience and reflection. Cognitive reappraisal is teachable. The shift from threat appraisal to challenge appraisal can be learned, and it produces measurable changes in both physiology and performance. Leaders can develop the ability to notice when the threat response is narrowing their thinking, and interrupt it.

The practical entry point isn't a personality overhaul. It's pattern recognition.

Start by getting honest about your own signals. Where do you move fast because the situation demands it, and where do you move fast because the discomfort demands it? Where are you performing composure rather than building it? Where have you closed on a position to get relief rather than because the evidence is sufficient?

These questions don't require a coach or a programme. They require a habit of honest reflection, ideally before you make the irreversible call.

The quiet advantage

I've said this before, and I'll say it again, we're not in a crisis market. Its not 2008, the GFC, or 2020, COVID. We're in a world defined by global dissruption - by the growth of AI, geopolitical instability, and accelerating market change. Certainty is going to be scarce for a long time.

The leaders who endure (and flourish) this next period won't necessarily be the most forceful or the most charismatic. They'll be the ones who can remain psychologically regulated while others narrow. Who can preserve cognitive range under pressure. Who can sit in the fog without demanding premature clarity, and think better because of it.

Emotional capacity under sustained ambiguity isn't a soft skill. It's an integration of measurable psychological processes: stress appraisal, emotion regulation, ambiguity tolerance, cognitive flexibility.

And in a world where ambiguity is no longer a phase but a chronic condition, the ability to regulate long enough to think clearly may be the most strategic capability you can grow.

As always, I'd love to hear your thoughts and feedback. Did the distinction between suppression and reappraisal make sense? Had you thought about it that way before?

Is there anything missing that you'd like to add?