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May 7, 2026

The best leaders know what they do not know

Two professors, Janka Stoker and Harry Garretsen, recently published an opinion piece in Het Financieele Dagblad with a deliberately provocative title: ignorance as a virtue for today's leaders.

Their argument, grounded in years of leadership research, goes like this: the leader who thinks they know everything is not just annoying. They are actively dangerous. And the more turbulent the environment, the more dangerous they become.

We recognise this immediately. It is one of the most consistent patterns we see in the organisations we work with.

The illusion of the all-knowing leader

The idea of a leader who has all the relevant information and can process it into the optimal decision is seductive. It is also a fantasy.

Stoker and Garretsen are direct about this: leaders making strategic decisions not only work with incomplete information, they are also cognitively unable to process all of it independently. No one is. Not the founder of a 40-person scale-up. Not the CEO of a multinational.

The problem is not the information gap. The problem is what leaders do when they feel that gap. The most common response, especially under pressure, is to close inward. Trust fewer people. Decide more unilaterally. Pull the strings tighter.

Their research shows that managers typically become more directive immediately after a crisis begins. This is precisely the wrong response.

The paradox of control

Here is the paradox the professors identify: leaders who feel most uncertain are most likely to centralise. And centralising is the least effective response to uncertainty.

When the context changes rapidly, when old routines no longer apply, when the playbook is out of date, the knowledge you need is not at the top. It is distributed throughout the organisation. In the people closest to the customer. In the team members who are quietly seeing what no one at the top is seeing yet.

Decentralisation, they argue, increases the likelihood of better decisions, precisely because relevant knowledge is dispersed. But that requires something most leaders find genuinely difficult: letting go of control at the exact moment they feel most compelled to grab it.

What this looks like in practice

We see this play out constantly. The founder who insists on being in every decision because he built the company and knows it best. The leadership team that talks to each other and calls it a diverse perspective. The executive who surrounds herself with people who confirm what she already believes, and calls it a trusted inner circle.

Stoker and Garretsen reference Kahneman and Tversky here: leaders under pressure fall back on simple rules of thumb. Rely on existing knowledge. Consult existing networks. These heuristics reduce complexity. They also create significant blind spots.

The result is decisions made with incomplete information, filtered through the biases of a small group, in exactly the moment when the broadest possible input would be most valuable.

Socrates was right

The professors end with Socrates, and we think it is the right place to end. The highest form of wisdom is not the absence of knowledge. It is the awareness of your own ignorance.

The best leaders know what they do not know. They know which decisions require their judgment and which ones are better made by the people closest to the problem. They have built teams where honest information actually reaches them, rather than being filtered on the way up.

That last part is not automatic. It requires psychological safety. It requires a culture where people can say what they actually see without fear. It requires a leader who has done enough inner work to distinguish between genuine conviction and ego-driven certainty.

That is a different kind of leadership than the one most organisations default to. And in turbulent times, it is the only kind that works.