These were my words to my belay partner, Luca, each time I stepped into a new pitch during our ascent of the Inner Tower West in the northern Drakensberg. The terrain was unpredictable. Communication was our only safety net. Success hinged not on foresight but on how well we could adjust in the moment.
This climb revealed something I often see in organisations but rarely hear named: the inability of leadership teams to think in the present. Most equate strategy with planning. Few remain mentally available to adapt when the terrain shifts. But it is in the shifting that leadership must emerge.
Drawing on Wilfred Bion’s concept of "thoughts in search of a thinker" and Simpson & French’s (2006) articulation of negative capability in leadership, this article argues for a more honest practice: strategy as an unfolding process, requiring attention, reflection, and emotional containment.
What is often missing in organisational life is negative capability (Simpson & French, 2006): the ability to remain in uncertainty without rushing to solution. It is the discipline of staying with discomfort long enough for new thoughts to find their thinker.
Bion urged psychoanalysts to "eschew memory and desire" and attend only to what is. Leadership, similarly, must suspend preconceptions and endure the not-knowing. Strategy becomes less about executing a plan and more about making meaning in real time.
This is not passivity. It is a highly active containment of anxiety - a waiting with purpose, so that what is true can become known, and what is needed can be named.
The question I now pose to leadership teams is this:
Are you thinking together in the present - or just executing an idea from the past?
Because success in volatile conditions doesn’t come from more planning. It comes from leaders who can remain emotionally available, think on behalf of the system, and act with clarity after understanding what is really going on.
Reference:
Simpson, P. & French, R. (2006) “Negative Capability and the Capacity to Think in the Present Moment” Leadership, 2(2): 245-255.