You’re not ready. You’ll never be ready. But that can’t stop you.
Whether it’s Apollo 11 landing with a computer screaming errors, Leftfield literally blowing the speakers at Brixton Academy, or every founder winging it through a board meeting, real leadership is about making decisions with incomplete information, trusting your instincts, and learning on the fly. In this lightning talk, Gareth Marlow will show you why waiting until you feel “ready” is a trap, and how embracing uncertainty-with confidence-separates those who lead from those who hesitate.
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Transcript
Gareth Marlow
So I thought, we’d just do a bit of a love letter to Cambridge, which is where I’ve lived for the last 35 years. And I kind of thought, well, the image generation stuff in chat GPT is quite nice, so let’s get it to do 30, 40, 50 great discoveries that were founded here in Cambridge. I think my particular favorite one, it’s just over here. The double heli structure of DNA that I’m a really big fan of that.
So if you just read all of that carefully, it’s basically like somebody clever was tripping on mushrooms and then did that thing. I just want to mention sort of three things really about my experience coming to Cambridge 35 years ago to study Natural Sciences and then discovering myself here completely and utterly out of my depth.
So the first is, what I mentioned is Newton. So about a mile from here, where he was based over at Trinity College. Mark’s, former colleague, college. And he gave both and he gave us so much. He gave us optics and the origins of, really the wave theory of light. He gave us calculus, which is really about the mathematics of change. And of course, significantly, he gave us gravity and an understanding of gravity. And you can go over to the Wren library and you can see his annotated copy of his first edition of the Principia Mathematica. So that’s about a 10 minute walk from here. Pretty cool.
Next one I want to mention is Jocelyn Bell Bunnell. I mentioned in my last Business of Software talk, and again, extremely resonant person for me, discovered pulsars, didn’t get the Nobel Prize for it, her PhD supervisor did. But you know, big strong stories there of imposter syndrome, of not really being believed, but really sort of holding ground, holding firm, and actually bringing to life, probably one of the most significant astronomical observation experimental bits of science of the 20th century. And it’s also pretty cool because it is just a few miles away across the fields, which means that when the Aurora are kicking off, you can just get in your car and you can go over there and stand in the field. And that was pretty, I’m not swearing, pretty cool.
Third data point, just Madingly Road, okay, so just two minutes walk from here. Other side of Madingly Road is there the Faculty of Mathematics. And for a couple of years, I had a job running the IT team over there who were responsible for running this supercomputer. And that’s not the team, that’s my kids, or two of my kids. And you know, we did it on behalf of this guy. So that was all pretty cool as well.
Anyway, so these things have been significant moments on the journey to our understanding of the universe and of gravity. I’m just going to take a minute and show you a little clip from a BBC Four documentary about kind of where we’ve gotten to what our current understanding about really, what the hell is going on out there. So over.
Video
So let’s see what the whole of Laniakea looks like.
Video
Each one of these dots is a galaxy, and each one of these lines is a pathway that they follow. Our Milky Way and all the other galaxies in our local group sit in one of the streams over there. All of the galaxies are being pulled by incredible gravitational forces along these pathways. They’re all moving towards a central mass called the Great Attractor. The Great Attractor is still a mystery, but it’s thought to have the mass of trillions of suns attracting galaxies across hundreds of 1000s of light years.
Gareth Marlow
So Laniakea, Hawaiian for immense heaven. That’s our current best understanding of really what the hell is going on. And I came across this a couple of weeks ago when I shared it on LinkedIn, because it really made me smile, because this brings together more or less everything that we really do understand about physics at the moment. So I’ll just give you a second.
So as I say, I’ve spent the last 35 years living in this fantastic city, and about the last eight or nine coaching a bunch of really super smart people, whether they’re in academia or they’re in software companies like most of you are, or in NGOs. All variety of different organizations. It’s just amazingly, just amazing people.
And one of the things that have sort of learned and taken away from this is is really that when we are approaching groups of other people that we’re going to be working with. We kind of tend to put themselves, put them on some spectrum, somewhere between the totally clueless and total geniuses, and the smarter that those people are, the more that we found feel that we’re down at the end of the spectrum. Whereas, actually after having had hundreds and hundreds of these extremely intimate conversations with people where they open up about their hopes and fears and their vulnerabilities and those kinds of things, it’s kind of my considered understanding that more or less this is how everybody actually perceives that. This is what they’re doing.
And here’s a little case and example again, back over the road to the faculty of maths. So this is Neil Shah. He’s an Emeritus Director of the Perimeter Institute in Canada. He’s the founder of the African Institute of Mathematical Sciences. He’s a TED Prize winner 2008. So, yes, he’s a genius. And yes, that is the completely unironic use of Comic Sans in a presentation, right? So if Neil can do it, then I kind of feel that I can. So, maybe we should all calm down a little bit.
So, yeah, something else I’ve sort of observed that on the self confidence front, it’s really interesting that almost there’s this direct correlation there between the more competent people are, the more the amount of self doubt that they actually have. And in fact, the really scary people, the really dangerous people, in my opinion, are the ones who don’t have that self doubt. So, the problem is not really uncertainty. The problem is just expecting that feeling of uncertainty to go away before we choose to act.
If you’re not feeling out of your depth, sometimes you are either dangerously overconfident, or you may be stuck in your comfort zone. And indeed, there’s a man whose opinion I respect deeply is really super smart who gave this comment in response to that physics LinkedIn comment that I shared. I mean, there’s somebody I kind of, I can’t imagine many people who I respect more in terms of what they understand and what they think, and that’s his honest, genuine position on these things.
So, that great idea, that grand plan, that thing that you think that other people have got, that you don’t have. I mean, it doesn’t actually bear interaction with reality, right? The great strategies that you admire, often it’s just an emergent opportunity that people took advantage of. Apple’s pivot to the iPhone kind of born out of desperation, right? Amazon, AWS, we needed some flexible infrastructure to run a book selling website. And in hindsight, they are fantastic strategies, but at the time, it’s not quite like that. So there is no master plan, and there’s really just the game, and it’s just the game that you choose to play.
So I’m not going to make the gag again. If you want to hear the gag, go and see my 2019 Business of Software talk. I am a dad, and dad’s dad jokes, they kind of need repeating, but anyway, I’m not gonna repeat it today. There is this myth of confident leaders, this sort of masculine energy found the mode bullshit like this is the only way to lead, and it’s not.
So confidence isn’t about knowing that you’re right, it’s about being willing to be wrong. And you don’t need certainty. You just need some momentum. Your team isn’t looking for a flawless leader. What they’re looking for is someone to help them to keep moving. And what that means is sometimes you have to act like you belong before you feel that you do.
So let’s talk about the game. And this is the tweet. This is the slide. So the game, aka, how to lead when you feel unqualified? Step one, admit that you don’t know everything. Step two, act like you do for just long enough to figure it out. And All right, that’s a little bit glib.
So there are some hints. First hint, be transparent about your uncertainty, but not paralyzed. Hint two, find some people who know more than you, and then actually listen to what they have to say. And step three, decide, act, adapt and repeat.
So to close, I’ve got an exercise for all of you. So get your phone out or your laptop out, and open your email client and compose a new email to me. That’s gareth@ecosystems.io, I’m going to move on to the next slide, and the email address is on there, so if you haven’t quite got it captured, you’re fine. And with that overthinking it just send me the answer to the following question. If you knew nobody actually had it all figured out, what would you do differently?
Gareth Marlow
Executive Coach & Consultant, eqsystems.io
Gareth helps leaders navigate the messiness of real-world leadership.
A former COO of Red Gate, he’s worked with high-growth tech startups, scale-ups, and academic institutions, helping executives handle the chaos of leading when the map is constantly being re-drawn. He’s coached founders through boardroom battles, CTOs through existential strategy crises, and leaders who weren’t ready, but had to step up anyway. Gareth brings a mix of battle scars, straight-talking insight, and just enough dry humour to make the truth go down easier.
He lives in Cambridge, UK, and still can’t listen to Leftfield’s Phat Planet without feeling slightly nervous.
