October 13, 2026Leading Through Uncertainty Starts With One Forward Step at a Time

Many years ago, Robert X. Fogarty handed me a marker and asked me to write something on my body. It was not a slogan. It was something I believed, something I wanted to carry with me. I wrote Siempre p’adelante. Always forward.

Those two words hold the most honest answer I have about leading through uncertainty. I did not learn it from a business book. I learned it by watching my mother. And the longer I lead, the more I believe that leading through uncertainty has less to do with having a plan and more to do with being willing to take the next step when there isn’t one.

That idea has stayed with me, and I want to share it here. Leading through uncertainty is no longer a rare skill that leaders pull out during a crisis. It is the daily condition of the work. Plans change, markets move, and people leave. What matters is what we do next. This piece is about the story behind my two words, what it taught me about movement, and why I think it matters for anyone guiding other people while the ground keeps shifting.

A Marker, a Message, and Very Little Space

Let me start with the marker, because that is where the story begins. For those who aren’t familiar with his work, Robert is the founder of Dear World, a storytelling project that began in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. He photographs people with a message written on their skin. It is one sentence that says something true about who they are, what they have survived, or what they want the world to know. That simple idea has grown into more than a million stories from people around the world. If you want to know more about the person behind it, you can read about Robert X. Fogarty on his speaker page.

What I have always liked about this project is that the marker gets past the polished answer. Most of us carry a presentable version of ourselves at work. We have the elevator pitch, the bio, and the carefully worded values statement. But when you have very little space, you can’t hide behind any of that. You can’t write that you are a results-driven professional who values collaboration. You have to choose. And what you choose shows what you actually believe, which is often different from what you say you believe.

The more I think about it, the more I see this as a leadership exercise. Ask a leader to explain their philosophy and you will usually get a paragraph full of qualifiers. Ask them to write it on their forearm and you will get something closer to the truth. The constraint is the gift. It forces you to find the few words that would still be there if everything else were taken away. That is where leading through uncertainty really begins. It does not begin with a forecast or a strategy deck. It begins with a few words you trust.

I think this matters because certainty about the plan is a fragile kind of confidence. It breaks the moment the plan does. But certainty about what you stand for travels with you from one disruption to the next. The best leaders I have met can say what they stand for in a handful of words, and that clarity is what lets other people follow them when things get messy. In my experience, leading through uncertainty depends far more on that kind of clarity than on having good predictions.

What My Mother Taught Me About Leading Through Uncertainty

My answer to Robert’s marker came from my mother. When my father died suddenly, I was a boy, and the plan for our family disappeared with him. What followed were cross-country moves, new schools, new jobs, and a life that had to be rebuilt while she was still living through the loss of the old one.

I don’t remember her giving speeches about resilience. I remember her moving. One decision. One box packed. One new beginning. Then another.

What strikes me now, as an adult who is responsible for other people, is that she had every reason to wait. Nobody would have blamed her for standing still until the shock wore off, until things felt safer, until she could see how it would all turn out. But she kept going. She did not have a map. She had the next step, and then the one after that.

I did not have the words for it then, but I can see now that she was practicing a form of leading through uncertainty that no course can really teach. She was leading a family, not a company, but the structure was the same. People were depending on her. The stakes were high. The path was unclear. And there was no one to call for the answer. That is the heart of leading through uncertainty, and it looks the same in a kitchen as it does in a boardroom.

We often talk about resilience as if it were a personality trait, something people either have or don’t. Watching my mother taught me that resilience is closer to a practice. It is built from small actions repeated when you don’t feel like repeating them. That is a more hopeful idea, because a practice can be learned. It means that leading through uncertainty is open to anyone willing to keep taking the next step, not only to people who feel brave.

And it is why Siempre p’adelante was my answer when the marker came out. It wasn’t a motto I picked off a shelf. It was a lesson I inherited, and it is still the best lesson on leading through uncertainty that I have ever received.

Why Waiting for Clarity Fails Leaders

I think about my mother’s example often now, because leaders today are asked to operate in almost constant disruption. Plans change. Markets move. Technology changes the work. People leave. Budgets tighten. Something you were certain about on Monday can look very different by Thursday. Leading through uncertainty is hardest in exactly those moments, when the thing you were sure of has just quietly stopped being true.

When that happens, there is a strong temptation to stand still until we can see the whole path again. It feels responsible. It feels like the careful thing to do. We tell ourselves we will decide once we have more information, once the picture is clearer, once the dust settles. But usually, the dust doesn’t settle. Usually, we can’t see the whole path, and waiting for the view to improve is a decision in itself.

What I have noticed is that standing still has a cost that is easy to miss. Teams read a leader’s stillness as a signal. When nothing seems to be moving, people fill the silence with their own stories, and those stories are rarely generous. They assume the worst. They start updating their résumés, or they quietly stop taking risks. I’ve seen this same pattern in many different rooms. The leader thinks they are being thoughtful, and the team thinks they are being abandoned. The real cost of avoiding leading through uncertainty is not the mistake you might make. It is the trust you lose while you wait.

This is why leading through uncertainty requires a different relationship with information. The goal isn’t to remove the uncertainty before acting. The goal is to act well while it is still there. Leaders who understand this are not reckless. They simply accept that the fog is part of the terrain. This is especially true now, as the future of work keeps changing faster than any plan can account for. A leader who needs the whole path before taking a step will rarely take one.

My mother taught me something quieter than any strategy. You don’t always need the whole path. Sometimes you just need the next step. And that is often enough to turn leading through uncertainty from a source of dread into something manageable.

Forward Is a Direction, Not a Speed

If there is one idea I would ask you to keep from this piece, it is this one: forward doesn’t always mean fast. We tend to hear the word forward and picture momentum, urgency, and a sprint. Many leaders are tired precisely because they believe that moving forward means moving quickly. They treat every disruption as a race, and they burn out trying to win it. But leading through uncertainty is not a sprint. It is closer to a long walk in weather you did not choose.

Direction and speed are different things. Direction is about where you are pointed. Speed is about how fast you go. You can move very slowly in the right direction and still arrive somewhere. You can also move very fast without any direction and end up farther away than when you started. When I think about leading through uncertainty, direction is the part that matters most. Speed can wait.

It is also important to be honest about what movement can’t do. Movement doesn’t erase uncertainty. It certainly doesn’t make grief disappear, and it doesn’t turn a hard decision into an easy one. I don’t want to sell you a story where one step fixes everything. It doesn’t. What movement does is interrupt the helplessness of standing still and wondering. It gives you something to do with your hands while your heart catches up.

That is a modest promise, and I think that is why I trust it. Leading through uncertainty is not about feeling confident. It is about refusing to let the lack of confidence become the reason you stop. A healthy attitude toward the unknown is not optimism about outcomes. It is a steady willingness to keep going anyway, one step at a time. In my view, that is the most practical form of leading through uncertainty any of us can offer the people who depend on us.

Small Steps That Count in Leading Through Uncertainty

So what does a forward step actually look like? In my experience, it is rarely dramatic. Sometimes forward is making the phone call you have been avoiding. Changing the plan. Asking for help. Admitting something isn’t working. Beginning again before you feel entirely ready. Each of these is small, and each of them is hard. And I have come to think that the difficulty has very little to do with the size of the step. It has to do with what the step asks us to admit.

Take the phone call. The call we avoid is almost always the one that holds the most information. It might be with an unhappy client, a colleague we have tension with, or a team member who is struggling. Good communication is often the first forward step in a difficult stretch, because it replaces assumptions with facts. In leading through uncertainty, a single honest conversation can do more than a month of planning.

Then there is asking for help. Many leaders see it as a weakness, especially when they are expected to have answers. But asking for help is also a way of sharing the weight, and it builds the kind of shared ownership that makes teams stronger. It is a quiet form of empowerment, because it tells people that their judgment matters. Leaders who never ask for help often end up carrying too much, and the people around them never get the chance to step up. That is a hidden weakness in how many of us approach leading through uncertainty.

Admitting that something is not working may be the hardest step of all. It means letting go of a plan we were proud of, and sometimes of the person we were when we made it. But it is also the step that frees up the most energy. Plenty of time is lost in organizations because people keep defending decisions that stopped making sense. Changing the plan is not a failure of leadership. It is leadership.

And beginning again before you feel ready is the final lesson. If you wait to feel ready, you will often wait too long. Leading through uncertainty means starting before the feeling arrives, and trusting that confidence will catch up once you are in motion.

What Movement Does for a Team

One thing I did not appreciate early in my career is how closely people watch their leaders during hard times. They listen to what you say, but they watch even more closely what you do. When a leader is visibly moving, even in small ways, it gives everyone else permission to move too. That is a powerful effect, and it is one reason leading through uncertainty is such a visible act. Your team is reading you for signs of whether it is safe to keep going.

I think this is closely tied to employee engagement. People stay engaged when they feel that their work is going somewhere, even if the destination is still blurry. They disengage when they feel stuck in a holding pattern that no one will explain. A leader who says here is what we know, here is what we don’t, and here is the step we are taking this week gives people something to hold onto. It is not a guarantee. It is a direction. And in leading through uncertainty, a direction is often enough.

It also shapes corporate culture over time. Cultures are built from repeated moments, and the moments that matter most are the uncomfortable ones. If a team sees that it is safe to admit a mistake and change course, that becomes the norm. If it sees that certainty is rewarded and honesty is punished, people learn to hide problems until they are too big to fix. In my view, a culture built around leading through uncertainty is one where people feel safe taking the next honest step.

The same thing is true for innovation. New ideas rarely arrive as finished plans. They come as small experiments, tested and adjusted along the way. A team that waits for the perfect idea will wait a long time. A team that is used to moving forward in small steps will learn faster, because it gets feedback sooner. Seen this way, leading through uncertainty and building an innovative team are not separate goals. They are the same habit.

Why Personal Stories Belong in Leadership

This piece is more personal than what I usually write, and I want to say why. I could have shared a framework with five steps for leading through uncertainty. There are plenty of those. But frameworks are easy to forget, and stories stay. The reason my mother’s example has shaped how I lead is not that I studied it. It is that I lived next to it. And I suspect that most of us learned our deepest lessons about leading through uncertainty the same way, by watching someone we loved keep going.

This is also what I find so powerful about Robert’s work. A project like Dear World shows what storytelling can do when it is stripped of polish. A person, a marker, and one true sentence. There is nothing to hide behind. And somehow, that is what moves people. It is the kind of inspirational and motivational work that doesn’t tell people what to feel. It simply makes room for them to feel it. It sits at the meeting point of arts and culture and human connection, and it reminds me that creativity can be a way of surviving as much as a way of expressing.

For leaders and event planners who want to bring these conversations to their teams, the voice in the room matters. A slide deck can explain a concept, but a story can change how people feel about it. Leading through uncertainty keynote speaker Robert X. Fogarty helps audiences do something rare: reduce a lifetime of experience to a few honest words, and then talk about what those words ask of them. That exercise opens up honest conversations about leadership that few other formats can.

I would also say that personal stories make leaders more trustworthy. When a leader shares a real moment of loss or change, it signals that they understand what people are going through. They are not pretending to have it all figured out. That honesty is a big part of leading through uncertainty, because people follow those who admit they are still finding the way.

The Next Thing That Moves You

I started with a marker, and I want to end there. Robert’s portraits ask people to reduce a lifetime of experience to a few words. Years later, mine still fit. Siempre p’adelante. That isn’t because my life has been simple. It is because the idea underneath those words has held up through every season of change I have faced. Leading through uncertainty has looked different at every stage, but the answer has stayed the same.

What I hope you take from this is that leading through uncertainty doesn’t require a bigger plan, a better forecast, or a calmer personality. It requires a willingness to move when you can’t see the whole path. My mother showed me that. She did it without speeches and without a strategy deck, simply by choosing the next step again and again. And in doing so, she taught me more about leading through uncertainty than any leadership program could.

So here is the question I’ll leave with you this week. What is your forward step? Not the five-year plan. Not everything you need to fix. Just the next thing that moves you. Maybe it’s the phone call. Maybe it’s the honest conversation, the request for help, or the decision to change course. Whatever it is, I’d encourage you to take it. Forward isn’t a speed. It is a direction. And in leading through uncertainty, direction is almost always enough to begin.

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