The Leadership Lesson on My Back: Why “Not Sure” Is Expensive in Business
- Roshna George
- 5 hours ago
- 2 min read
Years ago, I played in a tournament.
Team name on the front: Balls of Fury.
My coach asked what name I wanted on the back.
I was distracted.I said, “Not sure.”
I assumed he would circle back.
Game day arrived.
Across my back, in bold black letters:
NOT SURE
That is how I competed in an entire tournament — labelled by my own moment of indecision.
But the jersey taught me something far more valuable about governance and systems at scale.
1. Systems move with the input they receive.
Silence is input.Hesitation is input.Half-answers are input.
If you don’t make the decision explicit, the organisation defaults to whatever was last said — even if it was never meant to be final.
At scale, assumptions become operating models.
2. Systems execute literally.
They don’t interpret tone.They don’t infer intention.
My coach wasn’t being funny. He was being efficient.He simply executed what he was told.
That is precisely what happens inside organisations.
Systems operationalise the clarity — or the ambiguity — leaders provide.
3. Leaders cannot afford casual answers.
What you say lightly, others institutionalise.
If governance is unclear,If decision rights are undefined,If strategy is implied instead of stated,
“Not Sure” gets printed across your operations.
Not because people lack capability.
But because ambiguity scales faster than intention.
Clarity is not a communication preference.It is a governance responsibility.
That year, we still won the gold medal.
But I walked away with a golden lesson:
In leadership, ambiguity doesn’t pause.It defaults. It executes. It scales.
And in business, “Not Sure” is an expensive thing to scale.
Where in your organisation is “Not Sure” quietly getting printed today?
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