The advantage is not knowing what happens next.
It is seeing what others have not noticed yet.
When The Old Map Stops Working
There is a strange moment in business when everybody knows something has changed, but nobody is quite sure what comes next. You hear it in conversations. Decisions take longer. Budgets become harder to release. Projects get postponed. Clients hesitate. People who were confidently predicting the next twelve months suddenly become very interested in the next twelve weeks.
The natural response is to wait. Wait for the market to settle. Wait for customers to return. Wait for somebody else to make the first move. Wait for enough evidence to appear so the decision no longer feels risky. It sounds sensible. Sometimes it is.
But after four decades working around business leaders, entrepreneurs, governments, major organisations, media and live events, I have noticed something else. Periods of uncertainty expose a particular type of person. They do not necessarily know what is going to happen either. They simply behave differently while everyone is figuring it out.
I call them Pathfinders.
They Don't Know The Future Either
The interesting thing about Pathfinders is that they are not fortune tellers. They get things wrong. They change direction. Sometimes they spot an opportunity early. Sometimes they discover that what looked like an opportunity was actually a beautifully gift-wrapped dead end.
The difference is not their ability to predict. It is their ability to interpret.
I spent much of my earlier career in live entertainment and broadcasting. You learn very quickly that the room rarely follows the script. An audience reacts differently from the one you expected. Something fails. A guest disappears. A schedule changes. The person supposedly in charge suddenly looks at you as if you personally invented the emergency.
You cannot stop proceedings and announce, "Could everybody wait while I gather more data?" You read the room. You notice signals. You use experience. You listen to the people around you. Then you make the best decision available and keep moving.
Business is not always that immediate, but the principle is remarkably similar. When the environment changes, expertise is no longer just knowing the answers. It is knowing what deserves your attention.
The Advantage Is In The Room
This is one reason I became fascinated by what started happening at our Breakfast Club sessions. We deliberately put accomplished people from different worlds around the same table. Founders. Corporate leaders. Consultants. Creators. Investors. People from technology, property, finance, media and other sectors.
No pitching. No parade of business cards. No tedious sixty-second speeches where everyone pretends not to be waiting for their turn. Instead, we talk about what people are actually seeing.
And something interesting happens.
A problem that looks enormous inside one industry can look completely different to somebody outside it. One person sees falling demand. Another sees changing demand. Someone else recognises a behaviour they saw six months earlier in another market. Another person sees an opportunity none of them had considered.
Nobody walked into the room with the complete map. But collectively, they begin drawing one.
That matters because uncertainty creates an unusual commercial problem. When everybody has access to similar technology, similar information and increasingly similar AI tools, information itself becomes less of an advantage.
The advantage moves towards the people who can recognise which signals matter, connect things that appear unrelated and decide what those connections might mean before they become obvious.
And this is where many experienced leaders make an expensive mistake. They assume the safest response to uncertainty is to wait for more certainty. But what happens when everybody else is waiting for exactly the same thing?
What happens when certainty finally arrives?
