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“What do you say and do in those moments of uncertainty? You lead. That’s all you can do.”

My inspiration for this book came when I was sitting in a field with my dog for four days in July 2016. I was exhausted and in a head spin with a high volume of work and continuously operating out of my comfort zone. I was clear where I was heading but unsure how to get there. I knew that what I was experiencing was common for many of my clients as the world felt more uncertain on a global scale.

I took myself off for four days, sleeping in a safari tent on a farm with only my black labrador dog, Pepsi, for company. We had the most amazing time together, hardly seeing or speaking to anyone, and the result was the title of this book.

A title may not be much output for four days’ reflection, but it created a spark, and sometimes we need space for the creativity to come. I returned to work inspired, knowing that the uncertainty experienced in the world was a replica of the uncertainty that my clients and I were also experiencing.

Everything seems uncertain. Perhaps it always has. As research for this book, I interviewed CEOs from a variety of organisations and sectors.

Many of the CEOs I interviewed thought that uncertainty was not a new phenomenon but had become more obvious as the pace of change accelerated. They had learned to seek and create certainty amongst chaos, identify risks, prepare for them and accept the things they could not control.

But that’s easier said than done.

There are huge challenges facing leaders today. We live and work in uncertain times in an era of rapid change, driven by technology and the global economy. As people live longer and work longer, your career may span 50–60 years where previously it was about 30. In the last 50 years, we’ve experienced substantial change in the way we work. The next 10 years are likely to transform beyond recognition as new technology influences further the way we live and work.

Traditional forms of leadership are unsuited to addressing the current global problems of fear, polarisation and disconnection that exist in the workplace as well as the wider society. New and effective ways of leading need to evolve quickly and replace command and control, competition and hierarchy with collaboration and shared leadership. Yet few people have been trained to behave in this way. While everyone likes to think they are collaborative, few truly know how to embody it. The time for dialogue and exploring how we move forward together, embracing our differences, has never been greater. In parallel, the pressure people are under has never been more intense.

How we lead in business and the decisions we take fundamentally shape the world and society. The responsibility of leadership lies with each and every one of us.

The challenge of uncertainty

Uncertainty is uncomfortable. It is something to be embraced rather than feared, but it requires a shift in our thinking and behaviour. Uncertainty creates unforeseen opportunities if we are willing to step over the edge and out of our comfort zone. It also creates stress and overwhelm, fear and polarisation, and in those moments, you wonder whether you can continue like this. The volume of workload is overwhelming, and the fundamental desire to get everything right and be in control is not possible or sustainable.

A different approach is required in leadership. Somewhere, somehow, something has to change. You cannot meet aggressive targets in an environment of uncertainty unless something shifts.

Employees are experiencing the discomfort of leading through uncertainty. They know they need new skills, yet they don’t always get the relevant development. They want to evolve, yet often they lack the appropriate support to do so. The spotlight is on them, and there seems to be little room for failing and recalibrating. It’s uncomfortable and creates stress as people put inordinate pressure on themselves to “get it right”. Leaders need to find a way to ease the mental and emotional load, for themselves as well as for their team. Uncertainty generates a wealth of emotions that we must face head on and accept as being part of the process. We can minimise those emotions by adapting our behaviour and developing new skills.

In addition to the pressures of work, we are human beings experiencing the challenges of life. As work and life are more integrated than ever before, the challenges we face become more difficult to balance. Life is not certain for any of us. We can plan for things as much as possible, but events will always happen outside of our control. We can choose how we respond, and our choices have consequences.

Uncertainty has a cycle. It requires a letting go of one thing so that something new can emerge. Beginnings are often uncertain because the outcome is unclear, and beginnings arise from the ending of something else. People often feel as though their back is against the wall in uncertainty, and they make decisions from that state. We are all somewhat unskilled in uncertainty, and we are all also skilled in it. We have moments when we have no idea what to do and moments when we are willing to risk everything and take a stand for what we believe in.

We spend huge amounts of time imparting knowledge, believing we need to have the answers.

Uncertainty provides an opportunity to step into “How can we…?” This is a paradigm shift from knowing to not knowing, from individual knowledge and power to collective wisdom and collaboration.

Throughout this book, I explore how leaders in organisations must recognise the human challenges that we face – in ourselves and each other – and embrace them in leadership. Challenges are here to stay. Our role as leaders is to meet those challenges with curiosity, compassion, gentleness and courage.

Horses and uncertainty

In the course of my work as an executive coach and strategic leadership partner, I bring clients to work with my herd of five horses. It may sound strange but the horses invite clients to return to their true nature while working in an environment of uncertainty and unpredictability. It provides an opportunity for people to explore how they lead out of their comfort zone. Working with horses creates an embodied experience of leadership where people flex their leadership style, find new ways of leading and increase self-awareness through feedback.

My clients work with me and the horses on the ground. No riding is involved. Once you put a rider on a horse’s back, the relationship changes. When you work with a horse on the ground, it is based on pure partnership where neither party has ultimate control over what happens. It provides an environment for people to explore a different way of leading that is more relational, more collaborative, and based on engaging and inspiring others to work with you.

Horses are masters of sensing beyond the words, and they provide non-judgemental feedback on your non-verbal communication. They don’t care who you are or what job you do. They want to know whether you can lead them to safety, be clear about where you are going and include them in the decision-making through a solid relationship based on trust, mutual respect, confidence and compassion. The hierarchy is definitely flat when you enter the paddock. Your negotiation skills are about to be put to their greatest test. By including horses in the exploration, people show up more fully and gain greater insights into where their leadership is in flow and where it is not, thus allowing an opportunity for recalibration throughout the day.

Research shows that in the presence of horses, you align the head, heart and gut, combining the wisdom of your intellect with your emotions and gut instinct. The human race has been trained to rely on the information in our brains, yet we have so much more wisdom in our reach. When we align the intellect with our emotions and gut instincts, we are more authentic, have more clarity and behave in a more congruent manner.

A client leading Kalle

By their very nature, horses appear to be unpredictable to most people. That’s largely because we don’t always understand their behaviour. As a prey animal, their primary goal is the safety of the herd. They work as a cohesive unit and share responsibility for their collective safety. They therefore provide an ideal learning environment for leading through uncertainty.

Working with horses provides an environment of uncertainty where your leadership is in the spotlight. The horses require the same qualities of a leader that a human team requires – clarity, direction and purpose, balanced with relationships based on trust and mutual respect. They need all of this to feel safe, as people do, too. Ultimately, the horses want to know that you are authentic and acting with integrity. If you create an environment that makes them feel safe, they come with you; if you don’t, they plant their feet and refuse to move. Either way is feedback and a chance to recalibrate and expand your leadership capabilities by trying new approaches.

When people first meet the horses, they are often scared because they don’t know whether the horses will cooperate. The sheer size and presence of horses can be intimidating and invoke anxiety. Some people say they’ve never met anyone bigger and stronger than them, and it immediately poses a threat. This is especially true for men, many of whom often unconsciously use their physicality to exert power, whereas women are used to not being physically the strongest in the room.

Overpowering a horse physically is not going to be the answer. Telling them what to do because you are the boss doesn’t work here. Being a people pleaser won’t get you a result either. The horses want to know that you can lead them through uncertainty, balancing clarity and focused action with strong relationship skills.

I often start the day by explaining that I don’t know what is going to happen. The day is full of uncertainty and the unknown, and not just for the clients. I watch people shrink back at that moment. There is an expectation that as the leader of the day, at my venue with my horses, I should be “in charge” and “in control”. That’s a myth. I lead through uncertainty with every client. I never know how people will show up and how the horses will respond. I’m constantly flexing my approach.

The best we can hope for in any given moment is to lead and to make decisions based on the information we have available – not just intellectual information, facts and logic but also the information that we gain from our emotions and our gut instinct. Both of these provide us with great insights into what action we might want to take as a leadership choice in any given moment. Emotions and gut instinct have largely been dismissed in favour of logic and reasoning, but they are increasingly critical to the success of business.

Where are you striving to be “in control”?

What happens when you loosen your grip?

Your emotions offer an important source of information. If you are terrified when you first come face to face with a horse, it is feedback that you can use as a guide to how you might approach them and the first leading exercise. It would be foolish to put yourself into a situation that causes you to instantly reach a place of overwhelm, yet many find themselves in overwhelm in the workplace. In a moment of sheer terror, the wise option might be to ask for help, to reflect and observe or to seek more information to help guide your decision. Alternatively, if you feel relaxed when you first come face to face with a horse, then the next step of leading one is not as big a step and might take you only slightly out of your comfort zone. Part of what people learn is how to challenge themselves out of the comfort zone and how to create safety and support in doing so.

Everyone’s comfort zone is different based on values, beliefs, experience, self-awareness and self-esteem, and much more. There is no right or wrong baseline, but it is interesting to know where your benchmark is.

How comfortable are you leading through uncertainty?

How much do you seek control?

People’s default patterns of behaviour show up around the horses. Some clients I work with are confident with the unknown and are able to lead effectively, even if they feel anxious. Others are terrified to the point of overwhelm and need more support to achieve the same task.

Horses respond based on non-verbal feedback and provide a great opportunity to experience where you get out of your comfort zone and how you recover to a place of powerful leadership.

Background to this book

My leadership career began at IBM where I worked for 16 years. I held a variety of roles in the outsourcing business, and in the latter years of my career I was regularly asked to sort something out that was unclear but needed attention, often at a European or global level. I learned how to provide clarity of direction and engage a team to work with me in some challenging senior leadership roles. Always leading through uncertainty. I did the jobs nobody wanted, creating structure and certainty out of chaos and confusion. However, it was only in 2011, when I overcame my fear of horses and started working with them, that I really understood what it took to be an effective leader in uncertainty.

This book is born out of my combined leadership experience of working in the corporate world, running a small business and especially working with horses. I draw on both my experience and my clients’ experiences of working with horses to highlight the key concepts of leading through uncertainty.

Every day I lead through uncertainty.

Each time I lead a horse, I don’t know whether my leadership is enough.

Will the horse come with me? Will I be safe? Am I clear enough? Is the relationship strong enough? Can I achieve what I want to achieve?

Although I don’t dwell on these questions, they are always there in uncertainty. With little horse experience, I have only my leadership to fall back on. The horses will not go along with anyone or anything they don’t want to. Neither will people. They may come grudgingly or unwillingly for a time, but the low levels of employee engagement in business require a step change in leadership to energise people and organisations better.

In October 2016, I brought together a group of thought leaders to explore the topic of uncertainty. I was unfazed leading through uncertainty as a result of working with horses. I noticed that many of my clients were uncomfortable with the concept of uncertainty and not knowing, yet they were experiencing it and struggling with it on a daily basis. I ran a round table and included horses in the discussion. Yes, that’s right: I included horses. I stepped into uncertainty and trialled a new way of running a round-table discussion. I didn’t want the discussion to be purely cognitive and intellectual. I wanted the delegates to embody the concepts we discussed and gain feedback on how we lead from a different species. Horses provide a powerful way of enabling that to happen. My intention was to challenge our thinking on leadership and learning, to expand our awareness of the leadership skills needed for the future of business and to fully embody the concepts we discussed. I wanted us to shift our thinking and create ideas through dialogue and exploration.

The output of that day was a white paper on leading through uncertainty. As I wrote the white paper, I kept true to the discussion that the group had. I wrote up each topic based on the group’s collective discussion and notes, but I realised I had more to say, and it was a struggle not to include my own thoughts in the report. The report was published in November 2016, and the seed of the idea for this book was sown.

The Leading Through Uncertainty white paper can be downloaded at www.judejennison.com/uncertainty

When I took ownership of my first horse in December 2011 and started delivering Equine Guided Leadership, I recognised that leaders were operating against a backdrop of uncertainty in their work. I was living and breathing it daily every time I led a horse, as leaders were in their everyday work, sometimes realising it, sometimes not. When I talked about uncertainty with clients, I observed the discomfort they had with that word. Their desire to achieve results meant they were reluctant to admit that they might not be in control. Yet we are never in control.

Over time, the word uncertainty became normalised. We could no longer pretend that we were in control. Fear and polarisation were prevalent, the topic of mental health rose further on the agenda of organisations, and there was a recognition that uncertainty was here to stay, for quite a while at least. Clients realised they were leading through uncertainty and felt the emotional impact of it, yet they focused on creating more certainty by developing strategic vision, managing risk and building resilience for employees.

I’ve repeatedly watched clients try to exert control, only to discover that they get better results by softening their approach, letting go of attachment to a particular way and relaxing into their leadership. I witness them develop greater flexibility, adaptability and collaboration, leading to faster results. I believe our leadership is at its best when we allow it to be easy.

How this book is structured

This book is intended to provide new insights to the challenges we face of leading through uncertainty and the skills needed to create a new future. It encourages you to understand the emotional challenges that uncertainty invokes, and how you can overcome them through human connection.

In Part 1 of this book, I explore the context within which we are working today. I explain why I work with horses, how I came to work with them, the radical change we are experiencing in the world of work, the challenges we face as a human species in a technological world of fast-paced change, the need to evolve our leadership, and why compelling use of emotions is crucial for effective leadership.

Part 2 of the book explores the underlying emotional challenges we face when leading through uncertainty. I explain how uncertainty can lead to stress and overwhelm and how fear and polarisation are a fundamental part of navigating uncertainty. I explore how past experiences, pain and trauma influence our default habits and behaviours. I also look at how we can lead more consciously and be more mindful of how we are triggered, and how that influences us and those around us. We cannot expect to resolve and eradicate emotional responses; instead we must include them in our leadership.

Jude leading Opus (left) and Mr Blue (right)

Part 3 of the book recommends that we return to the core of humanity and allow computers to do the fast processing, allowing us to slow down and be human. It explores some of the skills needed in uncertainty and how we can lead through our humanity rather than as robots. These skills can help leaders find more balance and be more resilient in navigating the emotional challenges we face when leading through uncertainty.

Each chapter opens with an illustrative horse story, key concepts are highlighted in boxed statements, and thought-provoking questions are accentuated in italics. Each chapter ends with pointers to master uncertainty, followed by questions aimed at provoking personal insight and self-reflection. Throughout the book, there are case studies from business leaders which provide examples of where more than one client has had the same or a similar experience. Names have been changed to protect client confidentiality. In some chapters, there are contributions from other industry leaders where appropriate.

Throughout this book I make reference to client experiences with the horses and what they learn, but mostly this is a book about uncertainty and leadership. For more information on how I work with horses, my first book, Leadership Beyond Measure, provides substantial background, theory and case studies, as well as my own learning from horses. Where I reference clients, I use examples that have been experienced by multiple people in the same way. I have also changed names to maintain anonymity. While the client case studies are true examples of what can happen, they reflect the experience of many people rather than one individual.

Where you see this symbol, you will find reference to additional content, which is downloadable from my website at www.judejennison.com/uncertainty. This includes a workbook to capture your personal insights, white papers and other resources.

This book explains that however much you plan for every eventuality, nothing is certain in life, and we can lead in a new way without being reactive. I hope this book provokes reflection on your own leadership, as well as consideration for how you can support your team and organisation as you lead through uncertainty.

Are you ready for the ride?