Exactly two hundred years before my husband Mike died in 2017, John Keats was writing about a capacity I would start to need in buckets. He called it negative capability. At the time, I had never heard of the term, let alone imagined that it might one day become something I leaned on heavily.

John Keats lost his father when he was eight. His mother died when he was fourteen. His brother Tom died of tuberculosis while Keats nursed him. Keats himself trained as a doctor, assisting in surgeries and caring for the sick, before tuberculosis took his own life at the age of twenty-five. TWENTY-FIVE! The depth of wisdom he gained in such a short life might well serve humanity today.

In an 1817 letter to his brothers, Keats — then just twenty-one — named what he admired in Shakespeare (who himself had died two hundred years earlier) and what he sensed was essential for living well in an uncertain world. He described negative capability as the ability to remain “in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”

Negative here does not mean bad, pessimistic or defeatist. It is closer to what artists call negative space — the space that allows form to emerge without being forced. Keats was naming a capacity for restraint: the ability to stay present without prematurely closing things down.

Over the past few weeks, the phrase negative capability keeps crossing my radar — in articles, essays, conversations, and in books on leadership, psychology and social change. I take that kind of recurrence seriously. It invariably signals, pay attention! — that something is asking to be looked at again, perhaps through a new lens, or from the perspective of the world we are currently inhabiting.

So here is my attempt to unpack Keats’ term. It is shaped by grief, by working with leaders facing endings, by accompanying people at the end of life, and by the wider unravelling of the world we see all around us.

For so much is unravelling.

For some people, it is a deeply personal unravelling: an ending, a loss, a body that no longer behaves as it once did, an identity that no longer fits, a dream no longer possible due to circumstances.

For organisations, it shows up as restructures, redundancies, burnout and fatigue, loss of purpose, or the persistent ache of moral injury.

And at a societal level, I doubt any of us is not witnessing the fraying of systems and stories that once promised stability and progress.

Unravelling is hard. Unravelling is terrifying. And when it happens, our individual and collective instinct is to seek clarity. Certainty. Answers. Solid ground. What I have discovered, though, is that solid ground is often nowhere to be found. And yet, somehow, we still have to find a way to stand.

Certainty is soothing. It reassures us that someone, somewhere, knows what is going on — that there is a plan, that things are under control. In leadership cultures, especially, certainty is often mistaken for competence. Yet the search for certainty can quickly become a short-sighted, reactive defence rather than a resource.

Psychologist Renée Lertzman, whose work explores how anxiety shapes our individual and collective responses to existential threat, writes about how individuals and systems often default to urgency, action and control as ways of managing uncertainty. The results are familiar. Rushed decisions. Oversimplified narratives. Performative action. Promises made and broken. Erosion of trust. In our attempts to escape tension and discomfort, we end up reproducing the very patterns that created them.

This is where negative capability comes in.

Negative capability is not about doing nothing, but about not doing the wrong thing too quickly. It is the capacity to:

• stay present to what is unfolding when nothing is clear
• hold off action when answers are unavailable
• resist the urge to fix what cannot be fixed
• acknowledge and lean into the discomfort of not-knowing without trying to manage it away
• remain emotionally grounded and steady during endings and thresholds

In my work with leaders, I find that the most trusted ones are rarely those who “perform certainty”. Instead, they are the ones who name what is unclear and without clear edges, without collapsing into panic — and who can stay in relationship while things are unsettled. Negative capability, then, is also a relational skill. It requires certain conditions — what Lertzman calls relational homes — spaces where uncertainty can be named, emotions legitimised and power held consciously rather than defensively. Without these conditions, negative capability simply cannot unfurl.

This stance is well understood in domains far from business leadership.

In psychedelic spaces, one of the core practices a sitter must learn is how to stay present without steering, interpreting or reassuring too quickly. Interference is often unnecessary and sometimes harmful. Impact and meaning are built through attentive presence and through trusting the intelligence of the process itself.

The same is true at the end of life. If ever there was a moment when people long for answers — patients, families, friends, clinicians — it is at this mother of all thresholds. And yet, despite requests for clarity and certainty, the most honest response is usually presence. There is nothing passive about this. While outward action may be barely perceptible, inner steadiness, attunement and coherence are deeply activated.

My sense is that leadership in these increasingly complex times calls for the same quality: the ability to stay with what is emerging without imposing coherence before it is ready.

But can we wean ourselves off our need for certainty?

Certainty soothes anxiety; we are unlikely to relinquish our need for it entirely. But we may be able to change our relationship to it. We might endeavour to notice when our drive for certainty serves collective resourcefulness and resilience, and when it supports avoidance. We can practise slowing down otherwise hurried decision-making, and noticing the grasping to know. We can try instead to name what we do not yet understand, and allow endings to be acknowledged before rushing into fragile new beginnings.

This is not about avoiding responsibility, but about leading with responsibility — in a way that is congruent with reality.

My sense is that negative capability may be a (the?) core leadership skill for times of unravelling — whether individual, organisational or societal. Unravelling is not personal, nor is it failure, even though it often feels like both. More often, unravelling signals that old ways of working and being, identities and structures, have served their purpose.

Negative capability doesn’t promise tidy solutions, because there are none when life is complex. We know that assurances of simplicity are largely a thing of the past — if they ever existed at all. What negative capability invites instead is the resilience to remain present at thresholds without collapsing into denial, resignation or false certainty.

When I first encountered Keats as a teenager in my Brussels school, I doubt his notion of negative capability would have meant much to me, if even it were in the curriculum. But today, shaped by so much lived experience of love and death, loss and life, unravelling and re-forming — with all of the both-ands that come with the real messiness of life — it feels like one of the most essential leadership qualities of our time.