Negative Capability: The Leadership Skill no MBA Teaches.
A division head I work with had just come back from leave. While he was away, his deputies had run a challenging project on his behalf. They had held the first team conversations about a major change the company was rolling out from the top. The kind of change where nobody knows yet what it really means for their day-to-day work. He'd been anxious about leaving in the middle of it.
He was relieved to come back finding things had been moving. His team had run two sessions. People across the organisation had spoken up. One of his most senior managers had even sent calendar invites for the next two months without being asked.
I asked him how he thought that manager was doing.
"I think he feels safe," he said. "I mean, psychologically."
A pause.
"I haven't had a chance yet to actually sit down with him one-to-one to ask."
It's a simple comment and easy to let go unnoticed. It isn't denial and it isn't carelessness. It's a leader doing what most leaders do during change: look at what they can see on the surface, finding it reassuring as everything is running smoothly.
However, the energy in the wider organisation and the state of any one person on his team are not the same thing. The meetings are happening. The invites are going out. Nobody has come to him in distress. It seems as if everyone is doing great, is feeling safe, we move on.
It is in these one-to-one conversations where leaders can get the sense and feel of what is really happening. And yet, unfortunately, during times of change, when the pressure of speed and results are there, these meetings almost always get postponed.
The argument underneath the disruption.
One argument from an Insead Prof. Michael Jarrett recently left me thinking: when organisations face existential disruption, it's not the disruption that makes adaptation impossible. It's the avoidance of grief.
When loss feels too threatening to acknowledge, individuals and systems find ways to move past it without processing it. They intellectualize. They like to be overly optimistic. They build plans. They fill the calendar with meetings. All of it is real activity. None of it is the work.
Melanie Klein called it the ‘manic defence’. A psychological manoeuvre where the mind substitutes activity, forward motion, and the performance of vitality for the painful work of acknowledging loss. Loss of the old in times of change. In organisations, this looks like meeting where leadership radiates confidence before anyone has shared what is really happening, what is now being lost and ends.
The "change is an opportunity" messaging lands into everyones inbox before anyone has been allowed to feel that something is gone and it won’t be coming back anymore.
The capacity the system has not developed.
From education through to the senior leadership table, we reward having answers. We reward certainty. We promote people who move fast, decide confidently, and keep things moving. We treat ambiguity as a problem to be solved rather than a condition to be held.
As a result - leaders haven't developed the capacity to hold loss, uncertainty, not knowing - because the entire system they rose through has never asked them to.
The poet John Keats named the opposite of this in 1817. He called it ‘Negative Capability’ - the capacity to remain in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason. In a more everyday language, I like to refer to it as ‘staying with not knowing’.
Simpson, French and Harvey, writing in Human Relations in 2002, described what Negative Capability looks like in leadership practice: not decisive action but what they called ‘reflective inaction’ - the ability to resist dispersing into defensive routines when leading at the limits of one's knowledge and trust.
In practice, this means a leader who can stay with a team or an individual in the discomfort of not knowing without acting certainty they don't feel. Without rushing to a solution that makes the anxiety go away - for them. Leaders who act certainty don't contain their team's stress and worries. They amplify it. Because people sense the gap between what is being said and what is actually true.
Negative Capability is something that one can develop. It is a capability that sits underneath my Capacity framework - it is essential skill for leaders looking to expand capacity to hold more, complexity, uncertainty, in order to lead better.
And yet, it is also exactly the one that our system has actively punished from the moment we started putting grades on our school exams.
The other way.
Before an individual, a team, an organisation can adapt to the change, especially a major one where everyones anxiety runs high and nobody knows whats coming next, it needs the conditions to hold what's gone in the process. Not as quick solutions or a great internal communication campaign to reframe it.
It needs time. Space. Pause. To build the capacity to hold all whats coming, without collapsing and breaking.
The question for all leaders navigating AI disruption ( and changes that come with it) right now isn't only: what are we building toward?
It is also: what are we leaving behind and have we given enough time for our leaders and teams to process that?
What are you experiencing and seeing in your teams right now?
P.S If this is live in your organisation right now, I'd welcome a conversation.
Warmly,
