You know what they say about there being no clarity, like that of a person who’s recently stepped out of a role. Not been that recent for me. Six months ago, I stepped down from a full-time role in philanthropy. And both time and distance have offered me some clarity, a clearing of the fog around something I didn’t fully appreciate, understand, or unpack over the past decade. That of uncertainty. In many ways, we’ve treated it as a flaw, without ever recognising that it was perhaps the most important feature of the work we care about. Uncertainty offers opportunity. Uncertainty offers opportunity for multiple futures. But where along the way did reducing uncertainty itself become the important work? And in doing so created this very strange bind, so to speak.
Social change happens between people, between institutions, between relationships, and between systems, and in how they respond to each other. People learn, circumstances shift, and new possibilities emerge. And yeah, sometimes things that look promising fail, but also things we couldn’t plan for begin to matter and become visible. And there’s no way to require or mandate all of this being written and set in stone at the beginning of the journey.
In doing so, too often we’ve killed the thing we cared about, right? The ability of people doing the work to notice, learn, adapt and discover something that we didn’t already know.
Of course, there is uncertainty we should reduce: vague expectations, conflicting demands, late decisions, etc. And there is the uncertainty we need to learn how to hold: not knowing exactly what the work will reveal, not knowing which route will prove useful, and not knowing how our own understanding will need to change.
So here I am wondering if the important work is to create enough stability around the people/communities doing the work so they can work within uncertainty with a degree of, well, certainty, honesty, and fidelity. I don’t know what it asks of philanthropy, but it sure feels like a different starting point.
Originally written for LinkedIn on 1 October 2026. View original →