The Hidden Cost of Certainty
- Jul 13
- 7 min read
Ben Jones is a leadership educator and senior academic leader with over 15 years’ experience across performance, education, and the creative industries. Through his “Problems Not People” approach, he helps leaders diagnose challenges in systems, behaviours, and environments rather than individuals.
Certainty can offer a sense of safety, but it can also close the door to perspectives we have not yet considered. Through two personal experiences, this article explores how fear, leadership, and experience can shape our decisions and why the best answers are often created together.
“They’ll be fine.” My parents wanted Blake, our Cavalier King Charles Spaniel, to travel in the boot of their car with their two boxer dogs.
Something immediately didn’t feel right. My partner felt it too. We had spent the first few years of Blake’s life learning together, becoming increasingly interested in behaviour, training and how we wanted to care for him. Slowly, through experience, conversation and probably plenty of mistakes, we were developing our own understanding of what responsible dog ownership looked like and what we wanted our first experience of family to feel like.
So, when she raised her concerns, they shouldn’t have surprised me. In truth, they didn’t. I had felt the same pang of uncertainty myself. Then I dismissed her anyway.
At the time, I could have given plenty of reasons for my response. My parents had owned dogs for years. I believed they had experience and knew what they were doing, so if they said the dogs would be fine together, why would I question them? Looking back, I don’t think the decision was really about dogs. I was caught between the family I had come from and the family my partner and I were beginning to create together.
For much of my life, I had viewed my parents as complete role models. Their experience carried enormous weight, and challenging their judgement felt deeply uncomfortable. Somewhere underneath my certainty was a fear that disagreeing with them would create conflict, that I would be seen as difficult or, perhaps worse, that my partner would be blamed for “changing” me. Accepting that my parents were right allowed me to avoid all that discomfort.
The problem was that my partner wasn’t simply offering me her opinion. She was expressing something that we had been developing together. Through raising Blake, learning and talking, we had started to create our own values and ideas. They weren’t just her thoughts, they were ours. In my rush to avoid uncertainty, I had dismissed not only her concerns but something we had created together. It was a simple decision that landed as a betrayal.
When experience becomes certainty
Years later, I found myself making the same mistake again. Only this time, I wasn’t relying on my parents’ experience. I was relying on my own.
As part of my leadership role, I inherited responsibility for a longstanding collaboration between my institution and an international partner. The event had been successful for many years, but it had also attracted criticism internally around diversity, inclusion and the way opportunities were made available to students. I wanted to make it better and felt responsible for doing so.
So, I got to work. I formalised communications, involved senior stakeholders and started thinking about accountability, transparency and how the event could better align with the institution we were becoming. There was just one problem: I hadn’t properly spoken to one of the people who had spent fifteen years helping to make the collaboration successful.
By the time I realised, we had both been recruiting students through different processes and had somehow ended up with two different lists. In my determination to improve communication, I had failed to communicate. In my desire to create greater inclusion, I had excluded someone whose experience was fundamental to understanding the very thing I was trying to change.
I reached out to apologise and explain my intentions. His response was difficult to read. He told me that successful relationships are built between people, not simply through policies, and challenged me to consider whether I had spent enough time understanding what had happened before I arrived. In stepping in so quickly, he argued, I risked undermining years of work, knowledge and relationships.
He was right. But if I’m truthful, even my response to him revealed something about my thinking at the time. I acknowledged his experience, apologised and invited him back into the conversation. Then I continued to explain why greater clarity, structure and accountability were still needed. I had listened to him, but once again, I found myself drifting back into my own safety blanket of certainty.
What was my certainty doing for me?
These two situations happened years apart and, on the surface, had very little in common. One involved my partner, my parents and a dog. The other involved leadership, institutional change and a professional relationship. Yet the more I reflected on them, the more I realised I had repeated almost exactly the same pattern.
In the first situation, I had borrowed certainty from my parents’ experience. Years later, I had accumulated enough experience of my own. I had moved from believing they knew best to believing I knew best, without recognising that two seemingly opposite behaviours were serving the same function.
This was particularly uncomfortable because behavioural science had become increasingly influential in my leadership practice. I had spent years learning to become curious about the function of other people’s behaviour. It took me much longer to become curious about the function of my own. The answer, looking back, was surprisingly simple: fear.
With my partner, certainty protected me from the fear of challenging my parents. It allowed me to avoid the discomfort of acknowledging that becoming our own family might mean making choices that differed from theirs. At work, certainty protected me from a different fear: the fear of failure. I had inherited something that had been heavily criticised and was now within my leadership remit. I wanted to improve it, and taking control, moving quickly and trusting my experience gave me a sense that I could guarantee a better outcome. But more than that, I wanted it to succeed, and I was worried about how it would look if it did not.
In both situations, certainty made me feel safer and helped me avoid fear. The problem was that this safety came at a cost. By reaching too quickly for an answer, I had shut down the opportunity for other people’s experiences to influence my thinking.
The knowledge we create between us
For a long time, I believed the greatest danger of certainty was simply being wrong. I’m no longer convinced that it is. I think there is a more insidious cost when we believe we already have all the answers.
My parents had experience. My partner had experience. I had experience. The problem wasn’t that any of us should have abandoned what we knew, but that I had allowed one source of experience to end a conversation that needed to remain open. My partner and I were creating our own understanding of what caring for Blake and becoming a family meant to us, and that understanding couldn’t simply be inherited from someone else.
The same was true years later. I had legitimate concerns about the event I had inherited, and greater transparency, inclusion and accountability may genuinely have been needed. My colleague also had fifteen years of experience, relationships and knowledge that I did not possess. The better answer wasn’t necessarily sitting fully formed inside either of us. It was something that might have emerged through bringing those experiences together.
I think this is one of the greatest challenges facing experienced leaders. Experience is valuable. Expertise matters. Listening to your gut matters. Leaders should think deeply, develop ideas and take responsibility for making decisions. But experience can also easily become a blindfold of certainty. Without noticing, we stop inviting people into the creation of new understanding and instead invite them merely to comment on answers we have already created.
There is an important difference between hearing someone’s experience and allowing their experience to influence our own thinking. The latter requires us to remain open to the possibility that the conversation itself might create knowledge that didn’t exist before either person entered it.
Craft deeply, love loosely
Several years ago, in Nashville, I heard professional songwriter David Hodges describe his relationship with his own creativity using a phrase I have never forgotten. “Craft your songs deeply but then love them loosely.”
His point was that we should put everything we have into creating them. Learn the craft, make deliberate choices and care deeply about the work. But eventually, we must let go and be open to the myriad outcomes that may follow. Other musicians will play the songs, audiences will interpret them and people will find meanings in them that we never intended. Or they may simply flop. We cannot control what our craft ultimately becomes.
The more I think about leadership, the more I wonder whether the same principle applies. Perhaps the alternative to certainty isn’t indecision, abandoning expertise or pretending we know nothing. Perhaps, instead, we need to craft our thinking deeply, love our answers loosely and remain open to change.
We can and should bring everything we know, value our experience, do the work and take responsibility for our decisions, while remaining willing to allow another person’s experience to change what we think happens next. The understanding we are missing may be something we can only create with someone else.
Increasingly, I believe the greatest danger of certainty is not that we may be wrong. It is that we finish the answer before anyone else can influence it. In essence, we choose to end the story before it is even written.
Follow me on Instagram for more info!
Read more from Ben Jones
Ben Jones, Leadership Educator, Problems Not People
Ben Jones is a leadership educator and senior academic leader across performance, education, and the creative industries. He leads performance provision at the Institute of Contemporary Music Performance (ICMP), working across curriculum, teams, and industry partnerships. Through his “Problems Not People” approach, Ben explores how leaders can move beyond blame to diagnose challenges in systems, behaviours, and environments. His writing focuses on clearer thinking, better conversations, and practical leadership experiments in complex environments. He is the creator of Problems Not People, where he shares ongoing reflections on leadership in practice.
