Uncertainty May Not Be a Decision Failure

Here’s something I see time and again: organizations look busy. Work is moving. Plans exist. People are trying. And yet it doesn’t feel like progress. Important conversations keep looping. Priorities get revisited. Roadmaps change, but not in ways that feel intentional. Teams stay busy while outcomes arrive later, with less impact, or not at all.

When that happens, the usual explanations show up fast.
“Execution isn’t strong enough.”
“Alignment broke down.”
“We need clearer priorities.”
“We need to decide.”

I’m not convinced that’s the right diagnosis.

In many of these situations, the problem isn’t that people aren’t deciding. It’s that they’re being asked to decide things the system isn’t ready to decide yet. In complex work, cause and effect aren’t stable. You can’t reason your way to the “right” answer in advance. You only know what worked after you’ve tried something and watched how the system responded, and then adjusted based on what you learned.

But most organizations still treat uncertainty as a temporary inconvenience. Something to push through. Something that better planning or stronger leadership should resolve.

So leaders do what the system expects. They commit early. They fund broadly. They keep options open while pretending those options are decisions.

That’s how everything becomes a priority Not because people are careless. Because saying “we don’t know yet” feels irresponsible in environments that reward confidence and forward motion. The problem with that is that treating uncertainty like a decision failure doesn’t make it go away. It just drives it underground.

Roadmaps start carrying commitments they can’t support. Governance fills the gaps with process. Teams hedge, start more work than they can finish, and wait for clarity that never quite arrives.

From the outside, it still looks like progress.
From the inside, it feels exhausting.

This is where I part ways with the idea that organizations simply need to “decide better.” Some things do need decisions. Others need constraints. Others need time-bound experiments. And some things probably need to be stopped altogether. And when those distinctions aren’t made, everything gets treated the same. The organization demands certainty where learning is required, and patience where commitment is overdue.

That’s not adaptability. It’s confusion with momentum.

And there will be a cost. One that shows up quietly at first.

Work piles up between teams. Dependencies harden. People lose confidence that direction will hold long enough to matter. Audit findings, risk exposure, and delivery failures start appearing downstream, long after the original uncertainty was papered over. By then, the organization feels surprised by outcomes it effectively chose.

The shift isn’t toward being more decisive. It’s toward being more honest.

Honest about what’s actually knowable right now.
Honest about where learning is still required.
Honest about which decisions matter, and which ones are being forced too early because waiting feels uncomfortable.

That kind of honesty doesn’t reduce ambiguity. But it does reduce waste, delay, and self-deception. And in complex systems, that’s often the difference between staying adaptive and becoming brittle.