Deciding Without Certainty

We are devoted fans of Mick Herron's Slow Horses, both the novels and the Apple TV series. If you already know the world of Slough House, some of this will be familiar.

For everyone else, Slow Horses is set in a fictionalized version of MI5, the UK's domestic intelligence and security service. It follows a group of agents sidelined after mistakes or career setbacks and sent to work out of Slough House under Jackson Lamb, a disheveled, abrasive former field operative.

Much of the series contrasts Slough House with Regent's Park, MI5's polished institutional center. The Park has more resources, better technology, and access to far more information. Even so, its plans often prove less reliable once events start to unfold.

Slough House has far fewer resources, less technology, and much less access to information. Lamb works with what is actually in front of him, and he never mistakes that information for the answer. He builds a working view of what may be happening, notices the pieces that do not quite fit, and keeps revising as new information comes in. He relies on the data, but also on experience, judgment, and attention to the detail that contradicts the official story.

What Lamb understands, and the Park often forgets, is that the map is not the territory.

That distinction is useful well beyond the world of espionage. In our work with senior leaders, we often see a similar challenge: how to make sound decisions when the available information is incomplete, changing, or open to more than one interpretation.

The ache for certainty

The Conference Board's 2026 C-Suite Outlook, based on responses from more than 1,700 executives and board members worldwide, had one overriding theme: uncertainty. U.S. CEOs ranked it as their leading economic concern, while executives globally described a landscape shaped by geopolitical instability, rapid policy shifts, AI disruption, and changing labor markets.

The leaders we work with rarely lack intelligence or information. If anything, they often have more information than they can reasonably absorb. Most were trained to believe that rigorous analysis will eventually produce the right answer. In many of today's environments, that is simply no longer true.

Most executives have spent their careers mastering a familiar process: gather the data, analyze it carefully, make the decision, execute. That sequence works when the environment is stable enough for the past to predict the future. But, when the environment itself is changing quickly, the analysis can be out of date before it is finished.

In The End of Leadership as We Know It, Steve Garcia and Dan Fisher argued that data can become a trap in disruptive contexts. Data feels wonderfully precise and objective, which is exactly why leaders desperate for an anchor can over-rely on it. Most organizational data tells us what has already happened, and even real-time information still has to be interpreted. The result: leaders can end up with an increasingly confident picture of a world that is disappearing. That is the Park's recurring failure mode, and one we increasingly see in senior teams.

Best practices create a similar problem. Borrowed frameworks are useful when your situation resembles the situations from which they were derived. But in a genuinely complex situation, the variables interact in ways the framework wasn't built for. Applied uncritically, they can mislead you or push you toward exactly the same answer your competitors have reached.

This is where sensemaking becomes important.

Sensemaking is the alternative

Sensemaking is the work of developing a working theory of the situation. Sensemaking means identifying the factors that matter, mapping the relationships among them, forming hypotheses, and testing those hypotheses as new information emerges. There is analysis involved, but also judgment, interpretation, and a degree of creativity. Leaders have to decide what to pay attention to, what may be changing, and how to make sense of information that does not neatly fit with what they already believe.

This is essentially what Lamb is doing in Slow Horses. He works with an incomplete picture, builds a theory of what may be happening, and keeps revising as events unfold. The Park, by contrast, is often slower to reconsider an established interpretation once it has taken hold.

A useful business example comes from Intel. By the early 1980s, the company's memory-chip business, the foundation of its identity, was under intense pressure from Japanese competitors. Intel's leaders had plenty of data. The more difficult question was what that evidence meant for the company and for a business that had been so central to how Intel understood itself.

Andy Grove eventually posed a question to CEO Gordon Moore: If the board removed us and brought in a new CEO, what would that person do? Moore answered that a new leader would probably get Intel out of memory chips. Grove's response was simple: Why shouldn't we walk out the door, come back in, and do it ourselves?

The question gave them a different way to look at the situation. By stepping outside Intel's history and identity for a moment, Grove and Moore could reconsider what the evidence was telling them. They still could not know how the market would evolve or whether a different path would succeed. But they could see the business differently and begin acting on a new view of its future, one centered on microprocessors. The breakthrough did not come from obtaining more information. It helped them interpret the information they already had differently.

There is another pressure that can make this kind of thinking difficult: the perceived margin for error has narrowed. Decisions at senior levels may be scrutinized by boards, investors, employees, regulators, and the public. Leaders feel simultaneously pushed to act boldly and punished for acting wrongly. Under those conditions, waiting for more certainty can feel safer, even when the delay carries costs of its own.

And there is something that rarely gets said in strategy conversations: the barrier to leading differently is often as emotional as it is intellectual. The heroic model taught leaders to project confidence and appear invincible. Many executives privately fear that saying, “I don't know yet,” will read as weakness.

In our experience, the opposite is true. Teams often respond better to uncertainty than leaders expect. They can tell when certainty is being performed. A leader who says, “here is my current theory, here is what would change my mind, and here is how we will find out,” can build trust by making thinking visible and leaving room to adjust as the situation changes.

Five practices for deciding without certainty

1. Hold your plan as a hypothesis. Instead of asking whether the plan is right, ask what would have to be true for it to work, and what evidence would suggest it needs to change. Leaders who frame plans as hypotheses update faster as new information comes in and defend their egos less. Changing course becomes part of the process rather than an admission that the original decision was wrong.

2. Experiment before you commit. In complex environments, analysis can narrow the possibilities, but some questions are best answered through experience. When possible, test an idea on a smaller scale before making a larger, more expensive commitment. The question is not, “How do we get this right the first time?” It is, “What can we learn before we have to make the bigger decision?”

3. Know which kind of problem you are facing. Complicated problems, such as engineering a bridge, can often be addressed through expertise, analysis, and established methods. Complex problems, such as shifting a culture or entering an unpredictable market, are different because cause and effect may become clear only in hindsight. Applying tools designed for complicated problems to complex ones is a mistake we see senior teams make frequently, and it can be costly. In Slow Horses terms, it is the desk officer insisting that the operation conform to the plan while the field agent is confronting a different situation altogether.

4. Ground yourself when the map fails. When the external environment offers no reliable guide, your internal one matters more. Leaders with a clear sense of purpose and values make faster, more consistent decisions under uncertainty. Knowing what you are trying to accomplish, what matters most, and what you are unwilling to compromise can make it easier to adapt without starting from scratch each time circumstances change. The destination can remain fixed while the route changes repeatedly.

5. Think out loud with people who owe you nothing. Sensemaking is harder to do alone. Our own assumptions can become difficult to see, especially when the people around us share many of them. The executives we see navigate uncertainty well often have trusted people outside of their immediate reporting lines, functions, or organizations who can challenge their interpretation of the situation. The goal is to test your thinking with people who can challenge your interpretation and help you see what you may be missing.

Trading the answer for the question

The forces highlighted by The Conference Board suggest that uncertainty will remain a central part of the leadership landscape. For senior leaders, the challenge is learning how to keep making thoughtful decisions without waiting for the picture to become fully clear.

The leaders we admire most tend to stay open to new information, test their assumptions, and adjust as the situation changes. They have traded the comfort of the answer for the discipline of asking questions that help them make sense of what they are seeing.

Confidence under uncertainty does not come from knowing you are right. It comes from knowing you will find out quickly and adjust.

Regent's Park has the map. Lamb keeps watching the territory. In a world where the territory changes faster than the map can be redrawn, that may be the most important leadership capability of all.