Who Carries the Uncertainty?

When people talk about reducing uncertainty, what they’re often actually doing is moving it. Over the past few months, amid shifting political conditions, funding instability, and rapidly changing community needs, I’ve watched this happen in almost every conversation I’m having with clients and colleagues.

Uncertainty rarely disappears. It gets transferred. We create certainty for one group by asking another group to absorb it. Sometimes uncertainty is genuinely created by external condition no one chose. But even then, the question of who absorbs it is a choice. Employers distribute uncertainty to workers through changing policies. Organizations push it to frontline staff through shifting priorities. Funders push it to nonprofits through short-term grants, delayed decisions, and changing strategies. And nonprofits? They often pass it on to the communities they serve.

When certainty becomes the goal, organizations often become focused on creating the appearance of predictability than building their capacity to learn and adapt. And that’s where uncertainty starts to get pushed elsewhere.

I first started thinking about this after reading an article asking whether philanthropy should “hoard uncertainty” rather than money. The phrase stopped me. Foundations often have significant financial reserves, diversified assets, and institutional stability. Many nonprofits do not. Yet nonprofits are frequently asked to navigate funding cliffs, changing priorities, extensive reporting requirements, and uncertain renewal decisions. All while serving communities already dealing with their own instability.

The organizations closest to communities often bear the greatest uncertainty despite having the fewest resources to absorb it. This isn’t usually the result of bad intentions. It’s often the result of systems that have never explicitly asked: Where should uncertainty live?

This isn’t just a design gap. Institutions often have real incentives to project certainty to boards, donors, and the public. And the less power you have, the less safe it is to admit you don’t have all the answers.

Why this matters beyond the org chart

At first glance, this might sound like an abstract design problem. It isn’t. Where uncertainty lands has real consequences for individuals and organizations alike.

Within organizations, too much uncertainty leads to short-term thinking, staff burnout, and less learning. The people inside those organizations experience increased stress, reduced decision-making quality, and a shrinking sense of control. Uncertainty is not just an informational condition. It’s an emotional, cognitive, and organizational burden. That’s why organizations spend a lot of energy trying to reduce it - strategic plans, forecasts, risk assessments, theories of change. We look for evidence that tells us what’s working and what isn’t. The impulse is understandable. The problem is what happens when reducing uncertainty becomes the goal rather than navigating it honestly.

As an evaluator, I see this dynamic up close. Evaluation often starts from a genuine desire to understand what’s happening. But when uncertainty becomes uncomfortable, that desire can quietly shift into something else: an attempt to manufacture certainty that isn’t there yet.

I’ve sat in rooms where the real question was “what are we still learning?” and watched it get reframed as “what can we report?” It happens gradually, and usually without anyone deciding to do it. Practitioners get asked to explain outcomes that are still unfolding, attribute changes occurring within complex systems, or predict impacts that may not becomes visible for years. Metrics become proxies for understanding. Reports become substitutes for learning. The evaluation is still happening, but it has stopped being honest about what it doesn’t know.

That shift has a cost. When evaluation is used to project confidence rather than support genuine inquiry, it doesn’t just misrepresent what’s happening. It models for everyone involved that uncertainty is something to hide rather than something to work with. And that makes it harder for the people closest to the work - the ones already carrying the mots uncertainty - to name what they’re actually seeing.

I wonder if we’ve been solving for the wrong thing. Much of our organizational energy goes toward reducing uncertainty. But uncertainty is an inevitable feature of complex work.

The challenge isn’t how to eliminate it. It’s how to carry it honestly and equitably, together.

Learning as a way to carry uncertainty together

One of the most valuable things learning and evaluation can do isn’t produce answers. It creates conditions where uncertainty can be held in a way that moves us forward, rather than pushed onto whoever has the least power to absorb it.

I want to be clear about what I’m not doing here: offering a structural solution to a structural problem. If you’re a nonprofit on a funding cliff, better reflection practices aren’t going to fix that. But within the limits of what organizations and relationships actually control, there are ways to hold uncertainty that don’t just push it downhill.

And I want to be honest that these practices have limits. A funder who could offer multi-year unrestricted support and chooses not to isn’t going to be moved by better sensemaking conversations. Better conversations don’t fix underfunded budgets. But within organizations, and in relationships where there is genuine willingness, here’s what I’ve seen actually help:

The first shift is simple but underrated: building regular time to pause and reflect. Not to produce answers, but simply to notice. Organizations that do this stay more aware of what’s changing around them. They’re asking: What are we seeing? What’s surprising us? What assumptions are we still operating from? In uncertain environments, that kind of reflection practice matters as much as any action plan.

But reflection alone can become its own burden if people are doing it in isolation. Uncertainty also gets heavier when individuals feel alone in interpreting it. That’s why some of the most powerful learning I’ve seen happens when staff, partners, community members, and leaders explore questions together: What patterns are emerging? What are we making of this? Where do we disagree, and why? Shared sensemaking doesn’t resolve uncertainty, but it distributes the weight of it more fairly. And that distribution matters.

That shared orientation also makes the next shift easier: moving from prediction to experimentation. Many organizations respond to uncertainty by demanding more certainty before acting. But in complex environments, certainty often arrives too late. The question shifts from how do we know this will work to what can we learn from trying this? Evaluation can support that by helping organizations form hypotheses, run small tests, watch for signals, and adapt.

And all of it depends on one underlying condition: transparency. One of the fastest ways to amplify uncertainty is to pretend it doesn’t exist. When leaders, funders, or evaluators feel pressure to project confidence they don’t have, people sense the gap. Learning cultures make space to say: here’s what we know, here’s what we think, here’s what we’re still figuring out, and here’s what we’re watching. That honesty doesn’t eliminate uncertainty, but it keeps people from carrying it along.

Organizations that can hold uncertainty without pushing it down aren’t just being more equitable; they’re building something. They tend to learn faster, because people feel safe naming what isn’t working. They make better decisions, because they’re working with an honest picture rather than a manufactured one. And they build deeper trust - with staff, partners, and the communities they serve - because people can tell the difference between an organization that’s being straight with them and one that’s performing confidence it doesn’t have. But this capacity also requires conditions - resources, psychological safety, time - that aren’t always there. Building it is its own kind of work.

If uncertainty never truly disappears, what would it look like to carry it more honestly and to deliberately redistribute who carries to most?

That question lands differently depending on where you sit. If you’re a funder or institutional leader, it might mean asking what it would look like to absorb more uncertainty yourself - through longer grant cycles, more flexible reporting, or simply being honest with grantees about what you don’t know yet. If you’re a nonprofit leader or program staff, it might mean building the internal conditions where uncertainty can be named rather than hidden. If you’re an evaluator or consultant, it might mean asking whose certainty you’re actually serving when you design a learning system…and whether that’s the right anwswer.

None of us sits outside this dynamic. But most of us have more room to move within it than we use.

What comes into view for you?

I don’t write these essays because I have the answers. I write me because they’re questions I’m actively wrestling with in my work and conversations with others.

If this sparked a thought, challenged an assumption, or surfaced a question of your own, I’d love to hear it in the comments.

And if you’d like more reflections, questions, and observations on learning, strategy, evaluation, and navigating complexity, you can subscribe to What Comes Into View, my newsletter exploring what we’re noticing, questioning, learning, and paying attention to along the way.