What do you do when you’re faced with uncertainty and don’t know the path forward?

My favorite leaders to work with are the ones who don’t pretend to have all the answers.

They’re comfortable saying, “I don’t know.”

And then they figure out how to move forward.

In coaching others and in my own experience, I’ve found that when we don’t know, it helps to:

Find your rocks.

Then use them to move.

When I took a leap from management consulting into IT infrastructure and the cloud with AWS, I knew very little about the business of the cloud.

I started in the consulting partner organization and the public sector because I had two of the three legs of the stool:

• A career in management consulting, so I understood how consulting organizations worked.

• Deep experience delivering and selling in the public sector.

Those were my rocks.

They gave me something solid to stand on while I learned the third leg: the cloud.

And then I moved.

I knew that if I took a step, I would learn something.

It might not be the right answer, but it would give me information.

Maybe it would open a door. Maybe it would show me a better path. Or maybe it would help me close a door I didn’t need to walk through.

Either way, I was learning by moving.

I think we sometimes believe we need clarity before we can take action.

But sometimes, the action is how we find the answer.

Work and life will always have uncertainty.

Having my rocks and taking the next step has helped me navigate it.

We may not know the answer.

But we can find our rocks, take the next step, and learn from what happens.

What helps you move forward when you don’t know?