There’s a lot of ambiguity in the world right now. And yet our tolerance for not knowing feels surprisingly low.
Uncertainty is often treated as something to move through quickly. If you don’t yet have a view, the expectation is that you should arrive at one soon – or risk questions about authority, competence, or grip.
But learning starts with capacity, not certainty.
Aristotle distinguished between potentiality and actuality: we don’t begin with knowledge, but with the ability to acquire it. As he put it, “The things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them.”
Early on, perception itself is still forming. People experience this as uncertainty because they’re still learning what to notice.
Bion noted that when anxiety rises, groups often respond by doing the opposite of thinking. Under pressure, systems gravitate toward action, routine, or premature certainty as ways of managing discomfort. These moves can stabilise things in the short term, but they shrink the space where judgment and learning might otherwise develop.
From this angle, the rush to clarity can be more about relief than decisiveness.
When organisations lose tolerance for that in-between space, some familiar patterns appear:
- Questions focus on what feels manageable rather than what actually matters
- Familiar explanations are reused because they reassure, even when they don’t quite fit
- Activity increases while learning slows
- People look decisive while quietly working around what remains unclear
Where that space is held, the quality of thinking tends to be different:
- Questions are allowed to mature before being answered
- Disagreement stays workable rather than threatening
- Decisions connect more closely to reality, not just to the need to reduce anxiety
This isn’t an argument for avoiding action. Work still has to move and decisions still need to be made. But the conditions under which people are allowed to not know yet shape the quality of what follows.