Fearlessness in the Face of Uncertainty Teacher: Margaret Wheatley The whole globe is shook up, so what are you going to do when things are falling apart? You're either going to become more fundamentalist and try to hold things together, or you're going to forsake the old ambitions and goals and live life as an experiment, making it up as you go along. Pema Chdrn Meg Wheatley returns to Schumacher College to develop her work on the challenges of leadership in a chaotic age. Our current challenge -- as individuals, citizens and leaders, isn't the rapid pace of change. It's uncertainty -- not knowing what's next, what works, or where things are heading. As one healthcare executive commented about the future of her industry: "We don't know what we'll be doing, or who we'll be doing it with, or where we'll be doing it, or how we'll be doing it. But we do know that we'll be doing something." Few of us have been prepared to deal with this level of groundlessness. We learned the skills of certainty: we know how to set goals, create strategies, develop complex plans. We've been told that we can make the world work according to plan if we have clear intentions, a strong will, and good leadership skills. Now, these very skills create obstacles to our effectiveness. Our task now is to learn how to deal with uncertainty, not as a temporary state, but as a condition of life. How do we maintain our