You can view the recording on our YouTube channel here.
There is a thread that runs underneath everything else this conversation touched, and it surfaced almost in passing, in the chat, from Ilze Olckers. The Latin root of certainty, she noted, means to sift, to separate. Certainty, uncertainty and discernment are bound together at the level of the word itself. To be certain is to have separated one thing cleanly from another. And the suspicion that animated this whole dialogue is that our compulsive sifting, our reaching to separate and settle and know, may be the very thing that undoes us in conditions where nothing will hold still long enough to be sorted.
This was a conversation, in other words, less about uncertainty than about our relationship to it. Three voices carried it: Nicola Robins, who works with Indigenous Knowledge and sustainability and traces her practice back through Ngoma traditions; Joan Lurie, a systemic and organisational practitioner; and Steven Segal, a philosopher and therapist in the phenomenological tradition. They moved from divination, through Nelson Mandela in the worst days of the transition, to a question that turns out to be intensely practical: what does it take to build the conditions that let us stay in not-knowing, rather than bolting for a false certainty that makes everything worse?
Nicola Robins opened with a tale about her encounter with a well-known author on uncertainty, who declined to read her book on how Ngoma traditions navigate it. Beneath the honest refusal she sensed a quieter doubt, that a knowledge system built around divination could have anything to teach the modern mind about uncertainty at all. She traced Ngoma knowledge back some four thousand years, migrating slowly south with farming communities, and pushed back hard on the caricature of divination as superstitious, transactional fortune-telling. It was, she said, a social act and not a transactional one, something people did together, a process of collective intelligence, which is how people make sense of things together to know what to do next.
Her central caution was against what she called flattening: the well-meaning move that declares ancient Indigenous science and modern complexity science to be “the same.” That equivalence feels generous but it erases what is most different and most meaningful. Distributed agency in a complex system is not the same thing as the knowledge that the ancestors are everywhere, like water. The cosmology of ancestors, identity, fluidity and land is precisely what gets lost when we flatten one into the other. And the warning landed wider than it first appeared, because, as she put it, even when our maps and models are working, we have to stay open to difference, because they will not work in rupture, in deep uncertainty. The models we are using are already out of date. We are just keeping them functional a little longer.
“Divination was a social act, not a transactional one done by an expert for a payment. It is something people did together … a process of collective intelligence, which is how people make sense of things together to know what to do next. Even when our maps and models are working, we need to be open to difference, because they are not going to work in rupture, in deep uncertainty… the models and maps we are using are already out of date; we are just trying to keep them functional“. Nicola Robins
Joan Lurie picked up the thread by splitting uncertainty in two: the uncertainty out there, in the world and in organisations, and the uncertainty inside us, the not-knowing we have to learn to hold. The pattern she sees in the leaders she works with is a reflexive turn outward, a grab for the toolkit, anything rather than sit with their own not-knowing. She named the deeper danger precisely:
“The biggest risk we face, maybe, is in the grasping for the certainty, the collapse and the reduction into ‘we have to have the answer.’ It is this paradoxical idea about how to learn to be in the uncertainty for yourself, which we really do not have a muscle for.” Joan Lurie
Crucially, she argued, that muscle cannot be left to individuals to build alone. It has to become a systemic practice, something built into the architecture of an organisation. This is where she introduced the phrase that anchored much of the evening: uncertainty infrastructure.
“How do we paradoxically contradict that need for certainty by pulling people into uncertainty in safe, containing practices that are scaffolds? … These are not individual uncertainties and fears alone; these are systemic existential things we have to navigate together”. Joan Lurie
Steven Segal connected the grasping to the dominant Western reflex: the belief that to control uncertainty is to eliminate it. The opposite, he argued, is closer to the truth. The nationalisms that try to ward off uncertainty manufacture far more of it, for themselves and everyone else; the search for certainty is itself a destructive way of working with the world. And however rational we believe ourselves to be, he added, when uncertainty unsettles us our rationality is quietly conscripted into the service of our fear. Walter Wehrmeyer, writing in the chat, sharpened the diagnosis to two moving parts: there is more uncertainty than before, and that uncertainty is eroding the usefulness of the very models we lean on to read the world. He offered Brecht as the caution against mistaking the map for the territory, the man who, asked what he does when he loves someone, makes an image and makes sure it resembles them, and is asked, the image of your loved one? No. The loved one.
If the grasp for certainty is the trap, the question becomes: what lets us not grasp? The answer the room kept circling was the container, and the worked example was Nelson Mandela in April 1993.
Segal took the days after the assassination of Chris Hani, when South Africa stood on the edge of civil war. The Mandela he described is not the controlled, rational master of legend but a man in grief, anger and acute anxiety, who was nonetheless able to hold a nation precisely because he did not flee the breakdown.
“Mandela was not this controlled rational master that we think he is … Most of us run away. Mandela walked into the breakdowns of perspective, and he lived, and he thought from within the breakdown. He created this ‘we’ space for South Africa, black and white, black anger, white fear … I want to call this, at the risk of being totally wrong, an Ubuntu space that Mandela created for South Africa on that night [of Chris Hani’s assasination]”. Steven Segal
Three days after the killing he spoke to the country from his own anguish while turning it toward a democratic future, creating, in Segal’s words, a “we” space for South Africa: black and white, black anger, white fear, held together in one vessel. He named it, tentatively, an act of Ubuntu, and a kind of national therapy.
Nicola Robins added the dimension that brought the example to life. Mandela had been a herd boy in the Transkei, entrained from childhood in Ngoma culture and the architecture of ritual. His speech, she suggested, worked as a ritual container, a structure able to hold what no single person could hold alone. When you really understand ritual structure, she said, almost anything can become the container. He was using his speech as one.
“Ritual is a natural architecture … when you really understand ritual structure, you create the possibility of anything almost becoming the container. He was using his speech as a ritual container” Nicola Robins
This is also where Robins was most candid about the cost of the work. Learning to divine with twenty-five bones, each carrying its own meaning and capable of falling in near-infinite combinations, she said her overriding bodily response was nausea and the urge to run. Ritual is what makes that degree of not-knowing bearable; it is the architecture that holds the body steady enough to stay. Segal set Socrates beside her: the one thing I know is that I do not know, and the world opened up to him.
And then Joan Lurie introduced the paradox at the centre of the whole session. To hold the space of not-knowing open, you must simultaneously set firm boundaries. The transition-era CEO she described did not have the answer, but he held certain things as absolute: the way forward had to be non-racial, and his senior managers were required, against real fear, to cross the line and meet the then-banned ANC.
“When you are creating containing spaces, you have to put in boundary conditions and some non-negotiables, which become the riverbeds that the flow can happen through. It is not a chaotic fallout either.” — Joan Lurie
A river without banks is not freedom. It is a flood. The container is what lets the water move.
A blog could stop on that satisfying image. This dialogue did not, and the most useful thing about it is that it kept pressing on its own comfortable conclusions.
The first pressure came on the idea of the leader-as-therapist, and it was the chat, as much as the room, that did the work. Several people were uneasy. Were we really asking leaders to become therapists? Alexis Niki offered the move that resolved most of the tension. The therapeutic dimension, she said, is not about doing therapy to anyone. It is about doing your own work, so that you metabolise your anxiety rather than pass it down the line.
“Instead of passing off anxiety to somebody else, I metabolise it here, and then I interact. It is not therapy, but it is therapeutic. It is self-work.” Alexis Niki
Joan Lurie drew the cleaner line between asking leaders to be therapists and asking them to build systemic containing conditions, the latter being the real task. Segal argued that collapsing the two paradigms may not be the productive move. Holding both in their difference rather than reducing one to the other would counter the flattening instinct Robins had opened with.
Samantha Waki, joining from her father’s rural community in Kenya, where her grandfather was a diviner and her uncles became chiefs argued that a call to violence could not be folded comfortably into the language of therapy. She cautioned against celebrating African ritual without distinguishing its life-affirming forms from its destructive ones. There are, she noted, two schools of divination with two distinct aims, and she gets concerned when the distinction is dropped. The room did not smooth this over. Godelieve Van Heteren met it directly, naming the old and genuine dilemma of when every other means to affirm life has failed; Robins agreed that every culture holds this distinction and works it differently. The dissent was left standing, which is the right thing to do with a dissent that good.
A second challenge came from Emily Bunce, a marine social scientist working with communities in the UK and the Caribbean, who asked the ethical question plainly: what is the risk of carrying an “uncertainty mindset” into communities shaped by colonial history and material hardship? Robins answered that the work begins with your own history and positionality. As a descendant of colonial settlers, she said, it is almost impossible for her to bring a non-dual approach; if she is not conscious of that, she will impose it. A healing tradition focused on the individual can quietly erase a more collectivist one, not through malice but through its centre of gravity. Lurie tied it back to the title of the series: the plurality of uncertainty has to be held in context. There is how an individual navigates it, how an organisation does, a family, a community, a faith. The error is to pluck a practice from one place and drop it into another.
Which leaves the hardest question of all, and the one the dialogue honestly could not resolve: continuity. Alexis Niki named it. The work of story and narrative is wonderful in the room, she said, and then you walk out and you are back in the old habit within the hour. Organisations are not built to make daily time for this. It is real work; it requires leaders to take it seriously, to fail at it, to come back and try again, and she was not sure she could see it extending beyond the room they were in. Lurie held the counter-position, that some organisations are genuinely building these as their own habits and rituals, and that the imperative is to keep asking how to make it more possible, to normalise the practice rather than treat it as a one-off intervention.
Robins closed the substantive discussion with the line that has stayed with me since, because it reaches straight back into the work on pre-emptive peace and planetary commons that this series keeps circling. Almost anything, she said, even a tick-box climate-disclosure task, can become a container, depending on how you work with it. And then the deeper point: she is not the container. The task is. Because the moment she becomes the container, she becomes the expert who can hold it.
“I cannot be an expert in this transition, because no one has done before what we need to do now.” — Nicola Robins
That is the sentence to carry out of the room. We are being asked to hold conditions for which there is no precedent and no expert, our own included. The certainty we keep reaching for is not available, and the discernment we actually need, the older meaning buried in the same root, is the patient, collective, ritual work of sifting in the dark, together, without pretending we can already see.
Alongside the spoken dialogue, a second conversation ran in the chat, in writing rather than aloud. Some of it has already found its way into the account above, where it shaped the argument. What follows is its own holding: the voices of those who joined us from Austin, Cape Town, Barcelona, Johannesburg, Plymouth, Muizenberg, Emsworth, Edinburgh, Budapest, Nairobi and beyond, gathered here so that the record keeps faith with everyone who was in the room.
Walter Wehrmeyer set the frame for why this moment is so hard to read: uncertainty is not a residue left over once everything else has been predicted, but part of the complexity of all our lives, and the craving to escape it is deeply human.
“Craving certainty is essentially human. Uncertainty makes food production more difficult, makes social organisation less reliable, makes planning less helpful. But the more basic an uncertain system becomes, the less understandable the world around us is.” Walter Wehrmeyer
Anupam Saraph pressed the paradox to its edge, and Alexis Niki held the human reality of the craving in view.
“Isn’t certainty almost certainly a sign of the absence of life?” Anupam Saraph
“Uncertainty IS frightening, AND we need it. Certainty IS reassuring, AND we need it. Managing the paradox so that we don’t run away requires accepting that.” Alexis Niki
Godelieve Van Heteren’s spoken question kept developing in the chat, drawing out the certainties that may be vital rather than merely defensive: the certainty of future hopes, of the greater good, of better options than the status quo.
“Can we live without certainties of kinds? What certainty may also be vital?” Godelieve Van Heteren
“We must have change. Life is a verb. But we also need to find ways to accept and live with stuff that we cannot predict or know.” Walter Wehrmeyer
Several participants turned the lens onto where leadership actually fails, naming the concentration of corporate power and the way the craving for certainty has been hard-wired into prediction and algorithm.
“Power in corporate boardrooms has increased exponentially since the 90s, and a large amount of behaviour is modelled on CEOs of companies. How do you take these soft skills into the boardrooms to make better leaders, because they’re failing society at the moment?” Kameshnee Naidoo
“The boardrooms have been maximising profit based on prediction and algorithm. The crave for certainty is so embedded there.” Hanna Asipovich.
“I would imagine that Mandela was able to stay in contact with his own plurality, otherwise I don’t know how he could have held it for others.” Alexis Niki
“He was a master of huge change and of introducing massive uncertainty himself.” Walter Wehrmeyer
A dissent on ritual, violence and therapy
Samantha Waki, drawing on her own heritage, entered the sharpest challenge of the session, and the chat is where it was met rather than smoothed over.
“Killing and a call to violence is a security consideration. I find it odd to call that therapy. And this is the difference in how we view divination: there are two schools with two distinct aims, life-affirming and destructive. I get concerned when African ritual is celebrated without this distinction.” Samantha Waki
“It is a time-old deep dilemma, also for the life-affirming people: under what circumstances do all other means to affirm life fail. I felt that was what was being addressed, not a simple call to violence.” Godelieve Van Heteren
“I agree, Samantha. I think every culture has this distinction and works with it in different ways.” Nicola Robins
The chat is where Alexis Niki’s position crystallised in her question on who builds the containers.
“It’s the attitude one holds that is therapeutic. It doesn’t require people to BE therapists. We have to equip ourselves. And who is designing those systemic and organisational containers? If those individuals haven’t grappled in individual spaces, what are they bringing to the collective?” Alexis Niki
“Therapeutic spaces are individual spaces. The work is to think about what the systemic and organisational containments are.” Joan Lurie
“What if our therapy worked in an Ubuntu way: through the other, defining who we are in an existentialist way where I am becoming through you?” Astrid von Kotze
Ilze Olckers seeded several of the session’s most-quoted lines, including the etymology of certainty that opens this piece. The chat added further texture on ritual and collective practice, and Anupam Saraph turned the inquiry toward Ubuntu and healing.
“According to Thich Nhat Hanh, the next Buddha will be the Sangha.” Ilze Olckers
“Does the idea and practice of Ubuntu embody the acceptance of uncertainty? Does healing, then, need us to let go of our desire for certainty?” Anupam Saraph
As the session drew to a close, participants offered syntheses of their own. Graham Wood, a statistician, distilled the insight process; Emmanuel Mongon brought three decades of architectural practice to bear; and Godelieve Van Heteren found the session’s unofficial motto.
“We are all eager for quick fixes. There is a single insight process that takes time, from divination using bones to the way we discover mathematics: wallow, drop it and relax, then insight arrives. Mandela had the Being of a leader; we need that as well as the Doing of a leader.” Graham Wood
“Over thirty years of experience I found that when I introduce uncertainty into a place I design, people are much happier. It is about a degree of both, uncertainty and certainty.” Emmanuel Mongon
“Summary: what are we going to do? For nobody has a clue. Thanks a lot!” Godelieve Van Heteren
There is a LONG form of the notes from the transcript you can read here. You can also view the recording on our YouTube here.
We feel certain there will be another dialogue on uncertainty. Do let us know if you are sitting with threads from thsi one you would like to explore further.