DEGREES OF UNCERTAINTY
How leaders perceive risk and uncertainty is important. Studies have shown that leaders vary greatly in their tolerance for uncertainty. Bill Weldon, CEO of Johnson & Johnson, has observed that in order to manage risk, leaders have to be able to endure some degree of chaos until the right course of action appears. Harvard professor Ron Heifetz has written in Leadership Without Easy Answers that leaders have to endure chaos and uncertainty in order to create a “pressure cooker” in which people find their own answers and solve problems—rather than delegating upward to the leader to solve everything.
In Embracing Uncertainty, Phillip Clampitt and Robert DeKoch define a spectrum of uncertainty that begins with “laws” at ...
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