She had been waiting for certainty before she acted. The certainty wasn’t coming. And the waiting was becoming its own kind of decision.
This is one of the defining challenges of senior leadership — and one of the least discussed. Because the expectation, in most organisations, is that leaders have the answers. That decisions are made from a position of confident knowledge. That uncertainty is a temporary state, to be resolved before action is taken.
The reality, at senior levels, is almost the opposite.
The Information Will Never Be Complete
The decisions that reach the most senior leaders are, almost by definition, the ones that couldn’t be resolved at lower levels. They are complex, ambiguous, and consequential — and they arrive in conditions of incomplete information.
Waiting for complete information before deciding is not caution. At senior levels, it is avoidance — because the information will never be complete. The wait is infinite.
What distinguishes effective senior leaders is not that they have better information. It is that they have developed a relationship with uncertainty that allows them to act from values and judgment when data is insufficient.
The Compass in Fog
This is the essence of what I think of as True North leadership. A compass doesn’t need clear visibility to point in the right direction. It points according to its own orientation — regardless of weather, regardless of terrain.
The leader who has done the inner work — who knows what they value, how they think, what kind of impact they are trying to create — can make decisions in fog. Not perfect decisions. But grounded ones.
Decisions they can own, explain, and build on. Decisions that are coherent with everything else they stand for.
Coach’s Reflection: The question is not “when will I have enough information to decide?” The question is “what do I know, what do I value, and what does integrity require of me in this moment?” The answers to those questions are almost always available — even when the data isn’t.
Call to Reflection: Where in your current leadership are you waiting for certainty that may never fully arrive?
Yatish Chandrasekhar is an Executive Coach and Leadership Consultant at The Yogi Compass. He works with senior leaders across industries to help them discover their True North. If this resonated, he’d love to hear from you.