What If Uncertainty Is Actually an Advantage?

There is a lot of waiting going on right now. Waiting for the economy to improve. Waiting for the next government election decision. Waiting for restructures to finish or start. Waiting to understand what AI really means to each business. Waiting for customers to start spending again. Waiting for signs of positivity.

Waiting, essentially, for things to become clearer. But what if certainty isn't coming back anytime soon?

And what if the organisations, businesses and even cities that are thriving aren't necessarily those experiencing less uncertainty but are able to better manage living with uncertainty in it…

Christchurch is an interesting example.

While many parts of New Zealand have been struggling with sluggish growth, declining confidence and significant disruption, Christchurch and the wider Canterbury region have been showing a different kind of momentum.

There are sound economic reasons for this. Relative housing affordability, population movement, a diverse economy, strength across the wider Canterbury region and investment in emerging sectors have all played a part in it.

But I wonder if there is something else going on too.

Christchurch has already had to learn how to live without certainty. The earthquakes didn't give people the luxury of waiting until they had all the answers. 

Businesses had to relocate. People had to make huge tough  decisions about homes, jobs and families. Infrastructure had to be rebuilt. Leaders had to make calls without knowing exactly what would happen next all while dealing with trauma, grief, and loss within families, organisations, and communities.

There was no roadmap for what Christchurch was facing. And, critically, there was no going back to exactly what had existed before.

The city had to move.

You cannot wait for certainty before you move. I think this is one of the biggest challenges facing organisations right now. When uncertainty increases, our natural response is often to become more cautious. We wait for more information. We delay decisions. We protect what we have. We keep doing what we've always done because it feels safer than stepping into something we can't yet see clearly.

It is completely understandable. But waiting has consequences too. Sometimes the greater risk isn't making the wrong decision. It's making no decision at all.

Christchurch was forced to develop a different city. It had to adapt while things were still changing. Make decisions with incomplete information. Let go of some things that couldn't be recovered. Experiment. Rebuild. Adjust again and again. Sometimes not perfectly and not without some massive difficulties. But it kept on moving. It didn’t know what the future would look like, but it knew, it had to rebuild into something different and sustainable.

And perhaps that ability to move through uncertainty, rather than waiting for uncertainty to disappear, is part of what we're seeing in the city today.

Reset rather than retreat.

This is something I have been thinking about a lot through my work and while writing The Reset Code. We often talk about resilience as “bouncing back”. But I've become increasingly uncomfortable with that idea. Bouncing back assumes there is somewhere to go back to.

What happens when there isn't? What happens when the market has changed? When your workforce has changed? When technology has changed the way your industry operates? When your organisation has restructured? When your customers expect something different?

At some point, continuing to wait for the old normal to return stops being resilience. It becomes resistance. A reset asks something different of us.

It asks:

What is true now?

What do we need to let go of?

What can we influence right now, today?

And what do we need to start building next?

That doesn't mean charging ahead recklessly or pretending uncertainty isn't difficult. Good decisions still require information, judgement and consideration.

But there is a difference between thoughtful uncertainty and organisational paralysis. And I think more leaders need to recognise when they have crossed that line.

Christchurch didn't choose the circumstances that forced it to change. But over time, necessity created capability. The city learned that you can make progress before you have every answer. That rebuilding doesn't necessarily mean recreating what existed before. And that sometimes disruption creates the opportunity to build something different.

There may be a lesson in that for all of us right now.

Perhaps the question isn't:

“When will things become more certain?”

Perhaps we should be asking:

What are we waiting to become clearer before we act?

What are we still trying to get back to that may no longer exist?

And what could we start building if we stopped waiting?

Because perhaps Christchurch's real advantage isn't certainty at all. Perhaps it's that it stopped expecting certainty to come back.