Certainty.

I watched the movie "Conclave" during the holidays and somethings really stuck with me. The speech on Certainty was one such thing. It is difficult to build a diverse, tolerant society if we are dead sure that the way we do things is the only way, the right way. 

Certainty might also be the great enemy of successful companies. As soon as you are certain, you stop questioning, stop looking for new ways, new products, new trends. 
But if you are running a company, you need to make decisions, need to provide guidance and set a direction. You might also need to stick to your path for some time until you know whether or not it was the right one. 

So the million dollar question is how to combine the uncertainty, that must be there, with decision making. My way of managing it is to view it as a bet. You place a bet, make a decision and then see how it plays out. You can go for a high-risk high-reward kind of bet or a much safer one. 

In a conclave (at least in the movie), the process is to lock all the candidates in a room and let them converge on a leader through several voting's, intersected with "small talk" at the dinner table. They should vote on the leader they think would be the best. Or in some sense place a bet. Of course, no one knew and will ever know who was the best possible leader that could have been elected. The election will open up different paths, it will impact many things, change people and contexts, and eventually it will be impossible to say what came first: the hen or the egg. The leader or the new world.

Let's end with another great quote from the movie: "Without doubt there can be no faith". So if you have faith in the company you are building, your team, the world - it will inevitably come with doubt.