How do you lead through uncertainty without pretending to be certain?

Every leader I work with has felt this pressure.

The room wants an answer. The board wants a date. The team wants to know if their jobs are safe. And the honest answer is: I don't know yet.

So most leaders do the thing that feels safe. They pick a number and say it with a straight face.

It's the wrong move, and there's research on it.

In 2018, the Wharton researchers Celia Gaertig and Joseph Simmons ran eleven studies with nearly five thousand people. They found two things. People do judge an advisor who says "I'm not sure" less favorably. But they don't dislike uncertain advice. Ranges, probabilities, "this is more likely than that": people were fine with it. And when asked to choose, they were more likely to pick the advisor who gave them the honest range.

Confidence and certainty are two different things. People want the first. They don't need the second.

What's the pattern?

Admiral James Stockdale spent more than seven years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam. Jim Collins asked him, years later, who didn't make it out.

The optimists, he said. The ones who were sure they'd be home by Christmas. Then Christmas came and went. Then Easter. Then Christmas again.

Collins called it the Stockdale Paradox. You confront the brutal facts of your current reality, and you never lose faith that you'll prevail. Both at once.

That's what leading through uncertainty actually is. Not certainty about the outcome. Certainty about the direction and the next step.

What should leaders do now?

So, three things. They matter most in the public sector, where the uncertainty is real and the audience is everyone.

Separate the two sentences. "I'm confident in this plan" is a promise you can keep. "This will definitely work" is one you can't.

Give the range and the date. "Somewhere between three and six months, and we'll know more on the first of March." A range with a check-in date sounds like competence. A single number that moves sounds like spin.

And name Monday. People can live with an uncertain year if they know exactly what happens next week.

You don't have to know how it ends to lead people through it. You just have to be honest about the road and clear about the next step.

What are you pretending to be certain about right now?

Related: Is resilience a skill, or just what we call surviving?

Sam Rad, The Change Futurist. Keynote speaker on change, transformation, resilience, and AI adoption. Author of Radical Next. Book a keynote