13. Clarity ≠ Certainty: How to Lead When the Path Is Fuzzy
What’s new: We break down why true leadership isn’t about knowing all the answers — it’s about sensing, adjusting, and staying clear on your deeper purpose when everything around you is shifting.
Why it matters: In a complex, brittle world, leaders who cling to certainty get stuck. Leaders who prioritize clarity — and stay flexible — create resilience, innovation, and trust.
In this episode:
Why your brain craves certainty (and why it backfires)
The key difference between complicated and complex challenges
How to hold your vision tightly, but your plans lightly
Practical ways to think more clearly when you’re in the fog
How letting go of rigid “right answers” can uplevel your leadership
Resources mentioned:
Jennifer Garvey Berger’s Unlocking Leadership Mindtraps: How to Thrive in Complexity book
Bob Johansen’s book Leaders Make the Future: Ten New Skills to Humanize Leadership with Generative AI
The bottom line:
✨ Clarity is your compass. Certainty is a mirage. Learn how to lead with steady vision, even when the next steps aren’t clear.
💬 Love it? Share with a friend or tag @MichelleKayAnderson on LinkedIn.
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Transcript
Podcast Theme with music:
What if success wasn’t about working harder—but about expanding your capacity? Welcome to Upleveling Work, where we explore the real strategies that help leaders and professionals step into their full potential. This season, we’re decoding personal growth: how to overcome fear, navigate uncertainty, and build the habits that lead to lasting success.
I’m Michelle Kay Anderson—executive coach, systems thinker, and your guide to making work more human. Whether you’re leveling up in leadership, shifting careers, or just trying to stay sane in a high-pressure world, this podcast is here to help.
Let’s break old patterns, build new possibilities, and make work work better.
Opening
So far this season, we’ve explored what it means to evolve as a leader — to grow, to dream big, and to wrestle with confusion as you shape a life and career that energizes you.
But there’s another trap that can derail even the most grounded leader: mistaking certainty for clarity.
Here’s the shift we’re talking about today:
You need clarity about where you’re going, but you must hold loosely to how you’ll get there.
In today’s world — not just volatile or ambiguous, but brittle, anxious, nonlinear, and incomprehensible — what we need isn’t more certainty. We need clarity.
Why? Because the path is complex — and if you try to lock it down too tightly, you might miss the very growth, insight, or opportunity that’s trying to emerge.
Certainty Feels Good. That’s the Problem.
We are wired to crave certainty. Our brains evolved for survival, not nuance. In fact, false certainty is often safer than hesitation, from an evolutionary standpoint.
Jennifer Garvey Berger calls this the “mindtrap of rightness” — the feeling of being right is so seductive that it closes us off from curiosity, from learning, and from others. The more certain we are, the less we listen.
As neurologist Robert Burton said, “Certainty is not a thought process; it’s a feeling.” Just like anger or love, it arises involuntarily — but we often mistake it for wisdom.
The brain loves to create stories… it filters data into narratives that reduce stress — even if the stories are wrong.
This matters in leadership because we often:
Oversimplify what’s really going on
Jump to solutions before we’ve explored the complexity
Mistake our confidence for competence
And let’s be real: When the stakes are high — especially in mission-driven work — that bias toward certainty or action can feel like a leadership virtue. It’s not. It’s often a liability.
Complexity Isn’t Confusion — It’s a Different Game
Let’s start by exploring what complexity is and make a quick distinction. This comes from Dave Snowden’s work with the Cynefin (ka - nev - in) framework — a tool that helps leaders sense what kind of problem they’re facing.
✅ Complicated problems are knowable. They have cause and effect and a solution (Think: building a bridge, managing payroll, writing a grant proposal, filing taxes.)
🌪️ Complex challenges don’t. These problems are unpredictable and emergent. They shift as you engage. (Think: team burnout, trust breakdowns, or figuring out how to build a just and inclusive culture.)
Complicated is like a car engine — lots of parts, but fixable with enough expertise.
Complex is more like raising a child — every move changes the system.
Leaders often try to “fix” complex issues with clear action plans. But that’s like trying to choreograph a dance before the music starts. You can’t.
Here’s the kicker: the more we try to solve complexity like it’s complicated, the more tangled things get.
🔍 Jennifer Garvey Berger puts it this way:
“Humans have a genius for complexity — but facing it dulls our genius just when we need it most.”
When leaders treat complexity as complicated, they default to oversimplified stories, which blind them to what’s real.
“The more we try to control complexity, the less influence we actually have.”
🧠 Story : The Team Retreat That Backfired
When I first started coaching, I once designed what I thought was a ‘perfect’ team workshop — full agenda, clarity on outcomes, detailed facilitation plans. But in reality? It fell flat. People were overwhelmed and they felt talked at, not part of the process. That’s when I realized: we were treating something deeply complex — like rebuilding trust — as if it were a linear problem. Like if you just had this one framework, piece of data, or new perspective, that would be the ticket! It wasn’t.
When facing complexity, instead of solving, you need to slow down:
Notice patterns. In complex systems, noticing is a superpower. What’s really happening here? What’s emerging?
Slowing down allows you to Ask better questions. Think: “What are we learning?” instead of “How do we fix this?” - feels counter-intuitive because we want to jump to a solution. But working with complex problems is more like a dance.
Create complexity-friendly conditions - environments where people can evolve. That might look like:
Meetings that start with a moment of stillness and a check-in, not a status update
Teams encouraged to experiment, not just execute. Make small moves, sense what happens, then adjust
Leaders who model “I don’t know — yet” instead of pretending they do. Learn out loud
📊 A 2023 McKinsey report found that organizations with adaptive cultures are 3x more likely to outperform peers in times of disruption. Flexibility isn’t a luxury — it’s a leadership skill.
Clarity on the Vision, Looseness on the How
🧭 Bob Johansen is a leading futurist at the Institute for the Future, in his updated book Leaders Make the Future, he explained:
“Effective leadership means being able to express the direction of change - ideally as a compelling story - that a leader is seeking. The best leaders will be very clear about where they want to go in the future but very flexible about how to get there.”
In a BANI world, leaders must become clarity storytellers. Not rule-makers. Not enforcers. But narrators of where we’re headed and why it matters — even if we don’t know how we’ll get there yet.
Maybe for you, that means telling the story of a regenerative team culture. Or a more inclusive leadership pipeline. Whatever it is, your job isn’t to know all the steps. It’s to tell the story that makes movement possible.
Your job: hold the destination steady, and hold the path lightly.
This doesn’t mean being vague. It means:
Being bold about what matters most
Testing your way forward instead of forcing a plan
Staying alert to what’s emerging — because complexity can’t be predicted, only probed
🎯 Example: You may know your goal is a thriving, inclusive team. But the way you get there? It might involve conflict, re-learning, even letting go of strategies that worked in the past. That might feel like two steps backwards, if you are thinking about progress or growth in a linear way. But the key is keeping your focus on the outcome and staying open and curious about what is needed or available in this moment.
How to Think More Clearly When You’re in the Fog
When the path gets murky, many leaders either freeze or push harder. push harder. white knuckle it.
But clarity requires patience. It often comes after reflection — not before action.
Here are a few tools that can help when you’re in the fog:
Watch for cognitive dissonance. That tension you feel? It’s often your brain trying to avoid uncomfortable truths. Our egos don’t like to be wrong, and our brains don’t like to expend unnecessary energy. That’s why we rush to blame, seek simple answers, or cling to old patterns. Instead of pushing it away, get curious.
Ask yourself: “How do I know this to be true?” Especially when your assumptions feel rock-solid. Go deeper: Why do I believe this? What might I be missing?
Practice second-order thinking. Not just “What should we do?” but “And then what?” Push your thinking into future consequences. In complexity, every move reshapes the system — so stay alert to unintended effects.
💡 Pro tip: Remember, clarity often comes through sensing and adjusting — not from forcing a plan. Pause > Sense > Act > Adjust.
Two common mindtraps Jennifer Garvey Berger names become especially dangerous here:
Simple Stories: Believing “If I just do XYZ, things will get better.” Complexity rarely follows linear cause-and-effect. We have to resist collapsing rich realities into simple narratives.
Agreement: Thinking “Everyone’s on board, so we must be right.” In complexity, too much agreement can blind you to important dissent or different ways forward.
Clarity doesn’t mean consensus. It means making enough sense of what’s happening to take the next wise step.
In a future episode, we’ll explore one more tool, from Bob Johansen’s work: Practice dilemma flipping.
Dilemmas are tensions that can’t be solved — but they can be reframed. Instead of seeing them as problems to eliminate, see them as creative tension to work with.
What if the thing you think is blocking you… is actually the raw material for your next opportunity?
What This Means for Your Growth
We’ve been working this season to grow as a person and as a leader.
This episode’s invitation is simple but powerful:
Let go of needing to “know.” Focus on learning to “notice.”
True growth isn’t just goal-setting. It’s pattern-seeing. It’s experimenting. It’s noticing how your own mind resists uncertainty — and choosing to stay curious anyway.
Because in the work you do — for people, planet, purpose — clarity matters. But your desire for certainty? It just might be holding you back.
Leadership isn’t about being certain. It’s about learning to notice patterns, make sense of contradictions, and create meaning — especially when the path forward isn’t obvious.
When you feel that “certainty surge” — what story are you telling yourself? And what might a second story be? Could you come up with a third story? Practicing this type of mental flexibility will help you stay open so you can more accurately sense into the present.
Closing
If you’re feeling stuck because you can’t see the whole path, good. That means you’re in complexity.
Nothing has gone wrong. Hold your vision. Stay open. And keep walking.
And — speaking of staying open — next week, we’re going to explore one of the sneakiest ways certainty traps us: imposter syndrome.
Because sometimes, the story that feels most “certain” inside us is the one that says: “I’m not ready. I’m not enough.”
We’ll talk about how to loosen those stories, too — and find a new kind of leadership confidence rooted in growth, not perfection.
If this episode helped shift how you think about your own leadership, I’d love for you to share it — or reach out. Because clarity isn’t a solo sport. And the more we normalize learning out loud, the more capacity we build — together.
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