Making Sense of Self Doubt: "What if I am wrong?"
You don't need to be certain to speak up. You need to understand what you're actually waiting for.
By Elina ·
“What if I’m wrong, and everyone in the room can see it except me?” I remember sitting in a meeting room, there were too many people I didn’t know well and few senior people for me to be comfortable. I had a point to make, a counterargument I felt was important, but not yet discussed at all. They wanted to scale an advertising feature, and I had just finished research which among other things showed how much customers are frustrated by this particular feature. But the discussion stayed technical, then financial. My heart rate picked up, the impatience to speak building, and then another voice arrived: What if they’ve already thought about this and dismissed it for reasons I don’t know? I needed to be certain before I opened my mouth in front of all these people.
The conversation moved on without me making a point, and I felt disappointment and relief at the same time. I told myself I’d raise it with my manager afterwards, get his read, bring it up properly next time. The chance to participate, to bring a customer experience angle to the debate, to make myself visible (and vulnerable) was gone.
For a long time, I thought I was the only one who worked this way, that everyone else in this kind of rooms felt confident and outspoken. Then I started mentoring and coaching people, some at my level, some more senior than I’d been, men and women both, and I realised how universal this actually is. How much weight the fear of being wrong carries.
Who knows the right answer?
There’s something in our relationship with “being wrong” and “the truth” that we don’t examine closely enough. What if the problem isn’t really right and wrong at all, but how we make sense of things in the first place. What if the idea of a single right answer, sitting out there somewhere waiting to be found, is exactly the belief that keeps us frozen.
Think of an organisation in the middle of a rough patch, when the performance is sliding and growth stalling. Mid-management looks up, waiting for a vision, a strategy, an answer to arrive from above. Senior leadership looks down, hoping to see the real signals coming from the frontline, the “innovative ideas” from employees, the breakthrough insights from customer conversations. Sales points at Marketing. Marketing points at Product. Everyone, somewhere in the org chart, is convinced the right answer is sitting in someone else’s office. So where is it? How do you know you have enough of a point to speak up, not to assign blame, but to genuinely take a stance on what’s happening and what should happen next, even if this stance might be wrong?
Sense-making as a leadership function
We tend to think leadership means having the answers, being the one who tells right from wrong. But how does anyone actually do that? Leadership rarely means seeing the truth before everyone else does. More often it means being willing to offer an interpretation that wasn’t articulated yet.
We talk about leadership as decisions, direction, vision. Underneath all three is something more fundamental and much less discussed: leadership is the act of making sense:
Of the past, so people have some coherent account of what actually happened and why. It’s about shaping the narrative of who we are how we got here.
Of the present, which up close is almost always messier than it looks from a distance. So the leader should be able to step back and name what’s happening in the moment.
Of the future, not with certainty, but with enough of a vision that people can actually move forward.
And this isn’t a capability reserved for whoever holds the most senior title. We need it to manage our own work, our own choices, the people who report to us, long before anyone hands us the word leader.
The thing we were taught about certainty and speaking
Most of us learned somewhere early that you don’t speak until you know, that guessing out loud is a risk, that credibility depends on being right. Fair enough, in situations with clean, checkable facts. But most of what we deal with at work doesn’t offer that kind of clarity, and sense-making in those conditions works differently.
You don’t usually work out what you think and then say it. More often, you find out what you think by saying it, by watching how your own words land, what holds up once they’re out of your mouth and what doesn’t. The organisational researcher Karl Weick suggests you don’t know what you think until you see what you said. Certainty isn’t reliably the thing that comes before you speak, it shows up after we speak, or it could not show up at all.
Which means the real question was never how to get certain enough to speak. It’s what you’re actually trusting, in the moment you decide something is true enough to say out loud. Evidence? Instinct? The fact that a few people already agree with you? Or simply the fact that someone has to initiate the exploration of an idea, and there’s no good reason it shouldn’t be you.
That’s the honest starting point, less about more information or more certainty, and more about a clear look at what you’re actually standing on when you speak up. And it has everything to do with how we make sense of the world around us, something we rarely examine, mostly because we’re too merged with it to see it clearly.
The story of three umpires
I want to finish with this illustration from the same Karl Weick which captures the task of sense-making brilliantly. It’s a story about three baseball umpires asked how they call balls and strikes.
The first says, “I call them as they are”. He believes there’s an objective, measurable truth out there, and his job is simply to register it.
The second says, “I call them as I see them”. He knows his senses filter the event, that the call is his interpretation of what happened, not the thing itself.
The third says, “They ain’t nothing till I call them”. For him, there’s no reality until the decision is made. The event has no meaning on its own, it only becomes something once someone commits to a call.
Most of us move through work assuming we’re the first umpire, waiting to register a truth that already exists, if only we look hard enough or wait long enough. But most of the moments that matter at work, the ones where people are looking to you for a read, are closer to the third. Nothing is decided until someone decides it.
Originally published on Substack.