2023 Fellowship Forum: exploring uncertainty and polarisation

09 June 2023

2023 Fellowship Forum: exploring uncertainty and polarisation

By Georgina Fekete, Fellowship Director

How comfortable are we with uncertainty?

This is what Fellows explored at our Annual Fellowship Forum this week. We believe that one of the biggest challenges facing leaders today is leading through uncertainty and managing polarisation in organisations.

Sam Conniff from Uncertainty Experts inspired us to dig beneath the surface of uncertainty. “Ninety-four percent of the time ‘uncertainty’ is written, it’s in a negative context so it's understandable why the word makes you feel uneasy”, he said, but “those who harness uncertainty can easily become the leading lights in society.”

Sam, in conjunction with leading scientists at UCL, has studied the effects of uncertainty on c.20,000 people and learned that it causes fear, fog and stasis. Ninety-one percent of those they studied rated failure as their greatest fear, while 89% in the same study chose missed opportunity as their biggest regret. These two go hand in hand – a fear of failure can lead to missed opportunity. Embracing fear can lead to more opportunities.

A high tolerance to uncertainty is associated with greater collaboration, more open-mindedness, better decision-making, resilience and innovation – all traits of responsible leadership. And the good news is we can train ourselves to increase our tolerance to uncertainty through recognising not just what our head says, but also the signals in our body.

Margaret Heffernan demonstrated in her book Uncharted that uncertainty gives us opportunity and freedom but those who don’t embrace it are often associated with polarised views.

We explored how polarisation shows up in our organisations and what we can do about it. Gabrielle Rifkind from the Oxford Process shared her experience from working in conflict resolution that “the last thing people want to do is to be empathetic when there is a conflict”. Rather, we need to “understand why people think the way they do and get beneath their opinions, starting where the person currently is in their thinking, not where we want them to be. Only then will we start to understand why a person holds the beliefs they do.”

If you understand why people do what they do and think the way they think, then there’s more space for creativity and curiosity. It’s incumbent on us to create safe spaces where people can listen to different points of view and ‘manage the radical differences’ showing up in society and our organisations. As leaders, it’s important to reflect on how to manage difference in organisations.

Here are some questions we think are important for leaders to ask of themselves and others:

  • If uncertainty is a given, what can you do as leaders to responsibly manage differences of opinion and polarised views in your organisation?
  • Have you tried asking these questions: Why do you care so deeply about the ideas you have? What’s the background to why you believe what you do? What personal, political and social events have shaped you?
  • It’s fine to disagree with someone else, but what ideas can you find that are in everybody’s mutual self-interest?

Ultimately, uncertainty can lead to opportunity. What opportunity do you have before you to embrace uncertainty intentionally?