When Everyone Wants an Answer and You’re Still Working Out the Question

There are moments when everyone around you seems to want an answer.

What are we going to do? Where are we going? Are we investing? Are we waiting? What does AI mean for us? Do we need to change the plan?

Perfectly reasonable questions.

The difficulty is that sometimes you are still trying to work out what the question really is.

Last week I wrote about that feeling you can have when your business seems to have reached a plateau and, at the same time, you can feel a storm coming in your blood... you just don’t know what it is.

Perhaps this is what comes next.

The storm hasn’t necessarily arrived. Nothing has fallen over. Your business is still running and people are still doing what they do.

Yet the view ahead isn’t as clear as it was.

Things you used to rely upon feel less certain. Assumptions you have carried for years suddenly deserve another look. Technology is changing what is possible. Customers are changing what they expect. The wider world seems capable of changing direction between Friday afternoon and Monday morning and everyone still wants to know what you think.

That is part of the job.

When you are the Founder, CEO or Business Owner, people quite reasonably look to you for direction. The uncomfortable bit is that sometimes they are asking for certainty at precisely the moment when you have less of it yourself.

So there is a temptation to provide it.

Make the decision. Announce the plan. Get everybody moving.

At least then it feels as though something is happening.

I understand that instinct. Sitting with uncertainty can feel remarkably like doing nothing, particularly when you are responsible for the wages, the customers, the people and what happens next.

Yet there is a danger here.

You can make a perfectly good decision about the wrong question.

You can decide whether to invest in AI before deciding what problem you actually want it to solve.

You can restructure the team before understanding why performance has flattened.

You can push harder for growth before asking whether the market you built the growth plan around is changing.

You can replace somebody before asking whether you have made it possible for them to succeed.

You can spend an extraordinary amount of energy finding answers while still being unclear about the question.

The faster the world moves, the easier that becomes. Perhaps that is why this moment asks something rather different of you.

Not certainty. Not another prediction about what happens next. And certainly not an answer simply because everybody is waiting for one.

Sometimes you need enough space to look at what is actually happening and ask the question that sits underneath all the others.

What has really changed?

The Alchemists

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