Learning to Love Uncertainty

In my last piece, Running to Stand Still, I argued that the real blockers to innovation in our industry are almost never technological. The capital is returning, the tools are extraordinary, and yet we keep getting in our own way. The obstacles, I said, are cultural and organisational. I want to pick up exactly where that left off, because there is a deeper truth sitting underneath it, and it is one I have spent fifty years learning the hard way.

The truth is this. Uncertainty is not a bug in the innovation process. It is the whole point of it.

The comfortable place is the wrong place

Those who know me will know I am a lifelong David Bowie fan. I have listened to that man reinvent himself across every decade of my working life, and the older I get the more I think he understood something about creativity that most business leaders never grasp. In a 1997 television interview, the year he turned fifty and, as it happens, the same year I left employment to strike out on my own, Bowie put it about as well as it can be put: if you feel safe in the area you are working in, you are not working in the right area. Go a little further into the water than you feel you are capable of, he said, until your feet are not quite touching the bottom. That is where the exciting things happen.

He was talking about drum and bass records. But he might as well have been talking about building a business. The instinct of most organisations, and most of the clever people inside them, is to swim straight back to where they can stand. Certainty feels like competence. It feels like control. And in an industry built entirely on the management of risk, the pull towards firm ground is almost gravitational.

That instinct is what caps us.

Process innovation versus the real thing

Here is a distinction I wish more boards would sit with. There is a kind of innovation that is really just optimisation wearing a lanyard. You take the thing you already do, you map it, you shave the corners off it, you digitise it, and you make it faster and cheaper. This is process innovation, and it is genuinely valuable. It funds everything else. But it operates entirely within the known. It never asks whether the thing you are optimising should exist at all.

Process innovation is what a comfortable culture produces, because it is the only kind of innovation you can do without ever leaving the shallow end. It carries no real uncertainty, and therefore no real discomfort, and therefore, if we are honest, no real breakthrough. It is running to stand still.

The other kind is different in nature, not degree. It is system thinking and design thinking, the deliberate act of stepping back and asking what problem we are actually here to solve, and whether the entire architecture around it is fit for the answer. This is the mode that reshapes a market rather than tidying up your corner of it. And it cannot happen in a culture that treats not-knowing as failure, because system thinking begins precisely at the edge of what you know. You have to be willing to stand in the space where the answer is not yet visible, and stay there, resisting the urge to grab the first familiar solution that lets you feel safe again.

Reflecting on my own decades of business building, I describe this as the difference between the Engine Room and the Design Studio. The Engine Room runs today's business and it is measured, rightly, on eliminating variance and waste. The Design Studio invents tomorrow's, and it is measured on something an Engine Room person finds almost offensive: its tolerance for productive failure. Inside the Engine Room, a ninety per cent failure rate is a catastrophe. Inside the Design Studio, a ninety per cent failure rate is simply the cost of discovery. The moment you let the efficiency mindset sit in judgement over the exploration work, the organisation's own antibodies kill the very ideas that would have saved it. The two need each other. But they cannot be run by the same rulebook, and confusing the two is how good companies quietly become obsolete.

Why the brains stay switched off

There is a human cost to a certainty culture that I do not think we talk about enough. When an organisation punishes every misstep, it is not just killing ideas. It is switching off minds.

The most striking piece of evidence I have seen on this comes from Google, of all places. Their multi-year study of what made their best teams tick, Project Aristotle, expected to find that the magic ingredient was some blend of raw talent and individual brilliance. They were, in their own words, dead wrong. The single strongest predictor of a high-performing team was psychological safety: the shared belief that you could take a risk, admit a mistake, or float a half-formed idea without being made to feel ignorant or foolish. And this is not soft stuff. Google's own analysis found that sales teams high in psychological safety exceeded their targets by 17 per cent, while those low in it fell short by as much as 19 per cent.

Read that gap again. The same people, the same market, the same product. The only variable was whether the culture made it safe to live in the uncomfortable space. When it did, the brains came fully online. When it did not, they stayed politely, expensively, switched off.

This is what a culture of embraced uncertainty actually buys you. Not chaos. Engaged minds, solving problems both known and unknown, because they are no longer spending half their energy protecting themselves from the consequences of being wrong.

From resilience to gaining from disorder

The prize at the end of all this is worth naming, because it is more than survival. The risk theorist Nassim Nicholas Taleb drew a line. A fragile thing breaks under stress. A robust thing absorbs the shock and stays the same. But there is a third state, which he called antifragile, where the system actually gains from disorder, emerging from volatility stronger than it went in.

A business that has learned to love uncertainty is reaching for that third state. It treats flexibility not as slack to be trimmed but as an asset to be bought deliberately, the premium you pay today for the freedom to move tomorrow when you know more than you do now. In a stable world that premium looks like waste. In a volatile one, and ours is nothing if not volatile, it is the single most valuable thing on the balance sheet.

And this, in the end, is where genuine distinction comes from. Not from being marginally better at the same things as everyone else on the shelf, but from having the nerve to stand somewhere no one else is standing. Every business in our market is optimising the same processes with the same tools. Excellence, real distinction, the quality of being genuinely and recognisably yourself, is only ever forged out in the deep water where the answers are not yet obvious. Comfort produces sameness. Distinction is a decision to be uncomfortable on purpose.

The invitation

So my challenge this time is a little more pointed than the last. It is not enough to say you want innovation. Almost everyone says that. The question is whether you are willing to build the culture that makes it possible: one that treats not-knowing as the beginning of the work rather than a personal failing, that ring-fences a space where intelligent failure is tuition and not disaster, and that rewards the person who wades out past their depth rather than the one who never leaves the shore.

Bowie knew that when he felt too safe, he was in the wrong place. Fifty years in and around this remarkable industry have taught me he was right about far more than music.

The water is deeper out there. That is exactly why it is worth the swim.

Mark 'Hux' Huxley is the founder of Huxley Advisory, with nearly 50 years' service to the insurance industry. He mentors and advises businesses across brand, proposition, purpose, leadership and operations. He was the 2023/24 Master at the Worshipful Company of Entrepreneurs and the current Chair of the Financial Services Group of Livery Companies.