Living with uncertainty is uncomfortable.
It seems as though the instinctive response of all business leaders to the increasing volatility of business is to act as though they can control it. Faced with ambiguity, they reach for structure. They produce three-year strategic plans, commission more data, and spend hours on forecasting and scenario planning. All of this creates the comforting illusion of certainty — that the future can be tamed if only we plan hard enough.
HR plays our part in maintaining this illusion. Much of what we do is designed to give guarantees about the future — to make people believe we can predict, measure, and control things that, in reality, cannot be predicted with any certainty.
Take leadership frameworks. We spend months designing competency models that describe the perfect leader, the precise set of traits and behaviours they must display. I have spent countless hours trying to define the definitive list. It always felt so close — but never quite right.
Because, of course, it’s a fool’s errand. Leaders are not uniform products. The idea that we can prescribe an ideal version of leadership, when the world they lead in changes daily, is a comforting myth.
Or consider our obsession with workforce planning. We invest huge amounts of time and money trying to predict future headcounts, skills needs, and organisational structures.
Yet research suggests that around two-thirds of children entering primary school today will eventually work in jobs that don’t yet exist. How, then, can we possibly design a perfect plan for the workforce of the future, especially with the potential of AI to wreck our neat career paths?
We turn to tools like the nine-box grid to give us certainty about people’s potential. But as Marcus Buckingham reminds us, human beings are unreliable raters of each other. Our people data is riddled with bias — yet we continue to treat these flawed assessments as scientific truth.
The same goes for succession planning. Many HR teams take pride in having detailed, colour-coded plans showing a pipeline of future leaders. But one HR Director recently told me that over a third of the roles in their business hadn’t even existed two years earlier. So what exactly are we planning for?
Even our organisational charts contribute to the illusion. We draw tidy boxes and reporting lines that suggest order and clarity. But real work happens in fluid, cross-functional teams that form and dissolve as needs arise. The neatness of our structures can’t keep up with the messy reality of collaboration.
Then there’s performance management — perhaps the most striking example of HR’s pursuit of false certainty. We set annual objectives that are often obsolete by the end of the first quarter. We summarise an individual’s entire contribution into a five-point rating. We proudly report completion rates to the board as evidence that performance is being “managed effectively.”
All of this gives the impression of rigour, but it’s little more than theatre — a performance designed to reassure us that we are in control.
So, in our efforts to help organisations prepare for an uncertain world, we end up doing the opposite. We give them false comfort. We reinforce the belief that certainty is possible — and in doing so, we deprive them of the very capabilities they need to thrive amid uncertainty.
If HR is to make a meaningful contribution to the future, we must start by acknowledging what living with uncertainty really requires. We can’t eliminate uncertainty — but we can help people and organisations build the resilience and adaptability to live with it.
That means fundamentally rethinking how we approach our work.
Instead of reinforcing a culture of command and control through rigid processes, we can nurture one that trusts people to use their judgement.
Instead of prescribing the “perfect” set of leadership competencies, we can focus on a few essential attributes that build resilience — curiosity, humility, empathy.
Instead of annual, box-ticking talent and performance reviews, we can promote regular check-ins and meaningful conversations.
Instead of defining what a “good employee” looks like and measuring everyone against it, we can take a strength-based approach — discovering how each individual can make a unique contribution and flexing to accommodate it.
We can also help our leaders to model something far more powerful than certainty: vulnerability.
The ability to say “I don’t know” is not a weakness; it’s an invitation. It creates space for collaboration, experimentation, and learning — the very qualities that allow organisations to adapt when the unexpected happens.
It challenges our desire for control and exposes the limits of our expertise. But pretending we can plan our way out of it is no longer an option. The world is too fast, too fluid, too unpredictable.
Perhaps the first step for HR is to admit this openly — to acknowledge that we don’t have all the answers, that there is no fixed roadmap, and that many of our cherished annual processes belong to a more stable, predictable era that no longer exists.
If we can let go of the illusion of certainty, we can begin to design systems and cultures that are more responsive, more human, and more real.
We work with HR teams that want to keep developing their skills, rethink traditional approaches and respond confidently to change.
Take a look at how we can support your team through in-house workshops, programmes and the Disruptive HR Club.
The third book in Lucy Adams’ series for forward-thinking HR professionals explores why HR struggles to influence leaders — and how to build the confidence, credibility and authority to create real change.
