Trish's Blog

Think back to your education, your early career, the way you were taught to work. Almost all of it pointed in one direction: reduce the unknowns as fast as you can. Make a plan. Gather the data. Predict the outcome. Get back to feeling in control. Not-knowing was treated as a temporary failure to be corrected, a problem to solve on the way to the real work.

This served us reasonably well in a steadier world. It serves us poorly now, because the world is no longer steady enough to be planned into submission. And so we find ourselves in an odd situation. The skill that matters most in the years ahead is the very one most of us were trained to avoid.

That skill is comfort with the unknown.

Let me describe the moment I mean. It is the pause just before you speak up in a meeting, try something untested, or make a decision that matters. That small space where you do not yet know how things will turn out. Most of us were taught to treat that space as a danger zone, somewhere to escape quickly by reaching for the safe and familiar. Close it down. Get to certainty.

But that space is not a danger zone. It is where your most original thinking happens, if you can bear to stay there a little longer than is comfortable. Certainty is where you repeat what you already know. The Unknown is where something new has room to appear. The discomfort you feel is not a warning that something is wrong. It is the feeling of standing somewhere genuinely open, where the answer has not been decided for you yet.

The people who can stay in that space without panicking are becoming the most valuable people in any organization. Not because they enjoy chaos, but because the future is arriving faster than anyone can plan for, and when the plan runs out, somebody has to keep thinking. When the situation no longer matches the playbook, the person who can hold steady, stay curious, and work the problem in real time is the one everyone else turns to. They become a point of calm that the whole team organises around.

I want to correct a common misreading here. Comfort with unknowns is not a personality trait you either have or lack. We tend to talk about it as though some people are simply born tolerant of ambiguity and the rest are doomed to anxiety. That framing lets too many people off the hook. It is a skill. It can be practised and built, the same way you build strength or fluency. Which means the anxious planner you might recognise in yourself is not your permanent condition. It is your current level of training.

How do you build it? You start small and on purpose. You let a question stay open for a day instead of forcing an answer by lunchtime. You begin a piece of work before you can see the whole path, trusting that the next step will reveal the one after it. You notice the urge to grab the safe option and, now and then, you decline it. Each time you stay in the unknown a little longer and survive, your tolerance grows. The space that used to feel like falling starts to feel like room to move.

There is a confidence that comes from this, and it is different from the confidence of having all the answers. It is the confidence of knowing you can handle not having them. That is a far sturdier thing to stand on, because answers expire and situations keep changing, but the ability to think your way through whatever appears does not. Once you trust your capacity to respond, you no longer need certainty before you act. You can move without the full map.

This is what I want more people to understand about the moment we are in. The instinct to plan away every unknowns is not making you safer. In a world this changeable, it is making you slower, more brittle, and more likely to freeze when the unexpected arrives, which it will. The people who thrive will not be the ones who eliminated the unknown. No one can. They will be the ones who made peace with it and learned to keep thinking inside it.

So the next time you feel that pause, the small space before you know, resist the trained urge to rush through it. Stay a moment longer. That discomfort is not a problem to fix. It is the feeling of your most useful thinking getting ready to begin.