I revisited Kristi Nelson’s reflections on deepening our comfort with uncertainty recently, and it got me thinking again about how, in futures and foresight work, uncertainty is often treated as a problem to solve.
We scan for signals, build scenarios, model trajectories: all useful practices. But beneath them sits something quieter and more fundamental: our capacity to stay present when we don’t know what’s going to happen. Most of us have been trained to experience not knowing as threatening. We learn early that uncertainty should be resolved, overridden, or hidden as quickly as possible. In organisational settings, this often shows up as a rush to clarity: premature decisions, overconfident forecasts, or tidy narratives that smooth over ambiguity.
But uncertainty isn’t a failure state. It’s a condition of being alive, and especially of working with the future.
In facilitation, I’ve noticed that groups don’t struggle because uncertainty exists. They struggle because they don’t yet trust themselves to stay with it. When uncertainty appears, the impulse is to tighten, to control, to reduce complexity.
Good futures facilitation does something different. It helps people practise a different stance: one where not knowing is acknowledged without panic, and where the future is treated as something to relate to rather than master.
Comfort with uncertainty isn’t about resignation or passivity. It’s an active capacity — a skill that can be strengthened over time. When groups develop it, they tend to make better decisions, ask better questions, and remain more open to possibility.
The future doesn’t require us to know more than we can. It asks us to learn how to stay present with what we don’t.
I’ll leave you with some wise words from Thomas Merton, an American Trappist monk, theologian, mystic, poet, and social activist:
You do not need to know precisely what is happening, or exactly where it is all going. What you need is to recognise the possibilities and challenges offered by the present moment, and to embrace them with courage, faith, and hope.