Doubt is a leadership skill
Dr Anna Brown, Senior Lecturer in Management at the University of St Andrews Business School, leads the Executive Education programme Leading for the future. Here, she reflects on why doubt can strengthen leadership and how futures thinking builds preparedness rather than false certainty.
We are living in an era of uncertainty. Leaders feel it in the pace of technological change, in the climate emergency and in political volatility that can shift overnight. In that context, I have been thinking a great deal about the utility of doubt.
Leadership is often framed as confidence and decisiveness, as if the best leaders always know. Yet in complex and ambiguous conditions, certainty can become a performance. It may reassure in the short term, but it can also close down reflection and make us resistant to difference, change, and the warning signs hiding in plain sight.
For me, doubt is not weakness. It is the ability to be comfortable with not knowing. It is the capacity to sit with uncertainty and move with it rather than against it. That comfort creates space for openness, for listening and for changing course when reality no longer aligns with the plan.
Preparedness over prediction
Doubt matters because it helps leaders relinquish the fantasy of prediction. Even the best laid plans can unravel, not because planning is pointless, but because the world does not pause for our assumptions. When organisations move from crisis to crisis, leaders can become trapped in short-term responses, addressing immediate priorities and losing sight of the long term.
Futures thinking offers a different stance. Looking ahead means accepting that you cannot know precisely what will happen or when. What you can do is build readiness for change, rather than steering toward a single future based on a continuation of how the world looks today.
You cannot know precisely what will happen or when. But you can develop readiness for what might be around the corner. That is very different from trying to steer towards a single, known, ‘business-as-usual’ future.
Organisations that navigate disruption well rarely do so because they predicted the timing. They do so because they had already considered the possibility that conditions might shift and had built the capacity to respond. The work is not about certainty. It is about preparedness.
The inevitability trap
I am cautious about how often leaders describe the Future as inevitable. We know that AI is transforming work, the climate crisis is intensifying, and these disruptions will continue. In the face of such challenges, leaders can begin to lose agency. They become passengers, waiting for the Future to arrive.
Yes, we are living with the consequences of past decisions. Actions taken years ago shape our present. But that does not mean today’s crises are simply a matter of destiny. Futures thinking is also about agency. It asks leaders consider how present-day choicescan determine what kind of future is possible. It supports leaders in articulating and actively shaping a more desirable future.
Where do we want to be in 20 or 25 years? What might society require of organisations, then? What steps could we take now? These questions reframe leadership as responsibility rather than resignation and invite a deeper consideration of our role within planetary limits.
Changing the metaphors beneath strategy
Short-termism is not only an organisational issue. It is cultural. Many leadership decisions rest on assumptions so familiar that they go unquestioned. One example is the idea that “time is money”. This metaphor underpins urgency, speed and short-term returns, shaping what organisations value and reward.
If we begin to reframe these metaphors, we begin to reframe the world behind our decisions. What if we treated health as wealth, or resilience as value? Such shifts do not remove systemic pressures overnight, but they open space to question what we accept as normal.
Multiplicity and practical habits
A practical starting point is to rethink how we relate to the Future itself. The Future is not a single trajectory. It is multiple, open and uncertain. When leaders genuinely accept this, they begin to see more than one possible path forward.
Imagination and creativity are therefore not optional extras in strategy. They are essential capabilities. Futures work helps leaders practise these skills, often through collective processes that bring diverse perspectives into the conversation.
Simple tools can support this. Horizon scanning helps identify signals of change, including emerging changes at the edges of attention. Trend analysis supports longer-term thinking about how shifts might unfold. Uncertainty matrices help prioritise what really matters when information feels overwhelming, while frameworks such as the Three Horizons approach help connect today’s reality to more desirable futures.
Futures thinking can also reduce the risk of predictable surprises: issues that were arguably visible in advance but ignored until they became costly crises. Futures thinking is not about prediction. It is about learning early enough to act.
Why dialogue still matters most
Technology and data can support this work, but they cannot replace it. Quantitative analysis is valuable, but it cannot fully capture human behaviour, values or political dynamics.
Futures work is discursive. It relies on dialogue, reflection and the willingness to challenge our assumptions about how the world works. Leaders need the capability to imagine difference and otherness. Technology may assist, but it cannot do that work for us.
Beyond your own lifetime
Futures thinking also stretches our temporal imagination: how far into the past and the future we can think. Leadership changes when the Future is not only the one you will live in, but the one you will leave behind.
Seen this way, doubt becomes a form of care. It keeps leaders attentive, open and prepared. It helps them resist false certainty and act responsibly in the present, with an awareness of those who will come after us.
Used well, doubt is not hesitation. It is readiness.
Learn more
These ideas underpin Leading for the Future, a three-day Executive Education programme helping leaders navigate uncertainty and shape sustainable futures. Find out more about the programme and upcoming dates on the Leading for the Future webpage.