If You Can Just Allow It

We are taught early and often that not-knowing is a failure state. A gap to close, a problem to solve, a thing to learn from and avoid next time. Fail fast, till something sticks. That feeling is something to get through on the way to certainty. Which is safe and feels good. We build our lives and our tools around eliminating that feeling. You’re hired because you know, not because you don’t. In a world of experts, uncertainty feels uncomfortable, a flaw to be hidden or washed off before anyone noticed.

But I’ve always found uncertainty fascinating, not as a problem to fix but as a feeling to stay with. I’ve been fascinated for a long time by the creative potential of insecurity, by that lack of confidence about what is the right answer. How to do it or how to solve it, or how to make it. I’ve often found that the detours created by not being sure which direction is right are rich with unexpected opportunities. And that the cost of working with other people and collaborating with their uncertainty as well as my own is nothing compared to the potential.

Notice what happens in your body when you sit with not-knowing instead of switching straight into problem-solving to get rid of the feeling. Racing to be the expert. There’s a tension that comes from needing to solve, to fix, to prove you have the answer, a clenched, forward-leaning urgency, as if the unresolved thing were a threat closing in. But underneath, if you wait long enough, there’s another feeling entirely: something looser, more alive, closer to curiosity than fear. “I don’t know.” It’s freeing, if you can just allow it.

Knowing how to channel your uncertainty is a kind of skill in and of itself. Knowing how to move within that place and channel the feelings it brings up but remain open the possibilities at your finger tips. It is good to remember: there are often multiple answers that are right, you are almost always searching for direction not just the right path. It is an intuitive process, not a quiz. We tend to turn it into a right/wrong binary when we aren’t sure but the right answer might not be the interesting one. And the interesting one might initially look like a mistake.

Uncertainty in a team is even more interesting. I’ve often thought about how it shapes a team’s dynamic. Do you thrive off of each others expertise, or curiosity? Both are fine, but the latter doesn’t exclude the former, it just enhances it. As I became more aware of my own insecurities, I also became conscious of trying to make it okay to not be sure within my team, and to find ways to communicate that to everyone. This might seem small, but it can have a huge impact.

Because another mind is a gift. Not a second pair of hands, but a detour outside the confines of your own mind. It hands you back something different. This is real collaboration.

Which is why insecurity is such a quiet, corrosive force within a team, if it isn’t made safe. Not because problems don’t need solving. They do. But because people make decisions defensively when unsure. And the moment someone in the room is protecting themselves instead of following the thought, embracing the flow, the room stops being able to go anywhere surprising.

So much of what makes people able to do their best work together isn’t skill or motivation at all. It’s whether the people involved feel safe enough to be wrong out loud, in real time, in front of each other. They will have to be right sooner or later of course. But whether not-knowing is allowed to be a place they stay a while will help create the best possible outcome, together.

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