Negative CapabilityThe Leadership Quality No Competency Framework Can Record

On the evening of 26 December 1817 John Keats went to the Christmas pantomime at Drury Lane with two friends, and walked home afterwards to Hampstead with one of them, Charles Wentworth Dilke. Dilke was a scholarly man, an editor of old plays, and the two of them had what Keats, writing to his brothers the next day, called a disquisition. Somewhere on the walk several things he had been thinking about fell into place. The quality that made a great writer, he decided, was something he had no existing name for, so he made one. Negative Capability, he wrote, is when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.

He used the phrase once, in a letter that survives only in a copy, and never again. Two years later he returned to Dilke, in a long journal-letter to his brother and sister-in-law in America, and the second remark is less quoted than the first but says more. Dilke, he wrote, was a man who cannot feel he has a personal identity unless he has made up his mind about everything. The only way to strengthen one’s intellect was to make up one’s mind about nothing, to let the mind be a thoroughfare for all thoughts. Dilke will never come at a truth as long as he lives, Keats added, because he is always trying at it.

The phrase has had a long afterlife. It passed through literary criticism into psychoanalysis, and from psychoanalysis, in the early 2000s, into the study of leadership, where it is now something programmes mention. What it names is a quality that the machinery of modern organisations is built to prevent, and the second Dilke remark explains why. Organisations give their leaders identities made of decisions. A person whose identity is made of decisions cannot afford to not know, because to not know is to not be anyone.

What Keats Meant by Negative Capability

Keats was writing about Shakespeare, who possessed the quality so enormously, and against Coleridge, who did not. Coleridge, he thought, would let a fine insight go rather than remain content with half knowledge, because he was reaching for a system that would hold everything. Shakespeare could write Iago and Imogen in the same hand, with no visible preference between them, because he had no need to resolve the world before he could work in it. Negative capability was the capacity to stay inside a question long enough for something true to arrive, instead of closing the question to relieve the discomfort of its being open.

The word that carries the weight is irritable. Keats had nothing against fact and reason. He was describing the quality of the reaching, the itch that makes a person grab the nearest certainty because the itch is unbearable. The disquisition with Dilke was presumably an example: a conversation with someone who could not leave anything unresolved. Dilke’s problem, as Keats came to see it, was that his sense of self depended on having settled every question, so every open question was a threat to him personally. He was always trying at the truth, and the trying was what kept him from it.

Wilfred Bion took the phrase into psychoanalysis in 1970. The analyst, he argued, had to tolerate not knowing what was happening in the room, and had to resist the pull to impose a ready interpretation on the patient’s material, because the ready interpretation relieved the analyst’s anxiety rather than understanding anything. His instruction for the preparation was to enter each session without memory or desire, which is one of the strangest instructions in the literature of any profession and describes a state almost nobody can hold for long. Bion added something Keats had not needed. The analyst’s job was to be a container: to take in the patient’s confusion and dread, hold it without being overwhelmed and without handing it straight back, and return it in a form that could be thought about. Not knowing, in Bion’s version, was work done on behalf of someone else.

Negative Capability in Leadership: The Capacity to Wait

In 2002 Peter Simpson, Robert French and Charles Harvey published an article in Human Relations called Leadership and Negative Capability. Leadership studies had spent decades cataloguing what leaders do, and the catalogue was made entirely of positive capabilities: deciding, directing, communicating, driving. The authors proposed that leading at the limits of one’s knowledge required a second kind of capacity, the ability to resist dispersing into defensive routines when the situation was not understood. They called the first kind decisive action and the second reflective inaction, and argued that the second was being bred out of organisations by a culture of control and performativity in which inaction, however reflective, could not be defended.

The distinction separates two things that look the same from outside. A leader who does nothing because they are frightened and a leader who does nothing because the situation has not yet declared itself are both doing nothing, and the record shows the same blank. The difference is whether the not-acting is a discharge of anxiety or a containment of it. Reaching for the plan, the restructure, the consultant’s framework, is a discharge: it ends the discomfort of not knowing by producing something that looks like knowing. As The Strategy Delusion argues, the ritual of planning is often valued for the relief it brings rather than the knowledge it produces. Waiting, in the sense Simpson and his colleagues meant, is the harder thing. It is staying in the room with a situation that has not resolved, and keeping the people around you in the room too, when everyone’s instinct is to settle it and go home. That is Bion’s container, moved from the consulting room to the leadership team. The leader holds the group’s anxiety about not knowing so that the group does not have to discharge it on the first available decision.

There is an objection to all this, and it is a serious one. Karl Weick’s account of sensemaking holds that understanding comes from action: people act, see what their action produced, and make sense of the situation afterwards. On that view, waiting for the situation to declare itself can become its own alibi, a refined way of never finding out. The objection is right about a certain kind of waiting. It misreads Keats, though, whose target was the irritable quality of the reaching rather than reaching as such. Acting in order to learn, in small reversible steps, with the question held open and the result allowed to surprise you, is not a closure. Cynefin says the same thing in a management vocabulary when it tells leaders in the complex domain to probe before they sense and respond. The irritable reach is different. It acts in order to stop the question, and it treats the result as confirmation. Negative capability and enactment turn out to be two forms of one refusal, the refusal to close the question before it has been answered, and most organisations manage neither. They act decisively and learn nothing, which is the worst of both.

The instinct to close is not individual. As The Seduction of Certainty traces, organisations cling to the known even when it fails them, because uncertainty is felt as a kind of pain that the whole system is arranged to stop. The arrangement has a vocabulary. Decisiveness. Pace. Amazon’s leadership principles, copied by companies that are nothing like Amazon, state it plainly: speed matters in business, and many decisions and actions are reversible and do not need extensive study. That is a reasonable thing to say about a reversible decision. The principle offers no way of telling which decisions those are, and the people it is addressed to are rewarded for treating all of them as if they were.

Why Competency Frameworks Cannot Record Negative Capability

The problem Simpson, French and Harvey identified has an instrument, and it is the one through which organisations now describe what they want from their leaders. A competency framework is a list of observable behaviours. That is its purpose: to turn the vague idea of being good at leading into things an assessor can see and rate. Drives for results, makes timely decisions, communicates a compelling vision, acts with pace. Each entry is a doing, and each doing leaves evidence: a decision made, a plan produced, a message sent, a slide.

Negative capability leaves no evidence. Its exercise consists of not producing the thing the framework is waiting to count. A leader who holds a question open for three months, declining the restructure everyone expects, and whose team in that time arrives at an understanding that makes the restructure unnecessary, has done something the framework has no line for. What the framework records, if anything, is a quarter without a visible decision. The leader down the corridor who announced a transformation in week two has meanwhile produced a strategy document, a programme office and a launch event, each of which can be entered as evidence against the relevant competency. The framework is not neutral between these two. It was built to see one of them, and the 360-degree survey that feeds it asks every rater to score the same list. The selection starts earlier still. Every leadership interview has a question about a time the candidate made a difficult decision under pressure. None has a question about a time they declined to, and what came of the waiting.

This is why the quality does not survive contact with leadership development, and why it is odd to find it mentioned there. A programme can describe negative capability. It cannot assess it, because assessment requires an output, and it cannot develop it, because development in that setting means acquiring behaviours and this is the withholding of one. What the programme can do is convert the phrase into a positive capability under another name: tolerance of ambiguity, comfort with uncertainty, a listed trait with a score. The itch Keats described has then been scratched by the framework itself, which has reached after a fact about not-reaching and written it down.

Underneath the frameworks sits a model of the organisation in which anything that matters can be made visible and anything that cannot be made visible does not matter. As Organisational Psychology explores, measurement is never a neutral act of looking. It decides what counts. A system that can only count actions will, over time, select for people who act, and will experience the people who wait as a performance problem. The hero that The Quiet Hand describes, the decisive figure the organisation keeps asking for, is in part a product of this selection. He is what remains when everyone capable of waiting has been developed out.

Who Is Allowed Not to Know

Not knowing is not evenly available, and this is the question neither Keats nor the leadership literature asks.

A chief executive who says in a town hall that she does not know how the next two years will go is practising humility, and the statement will be quoted approvingly for weeks. A middle manager who says the same thing in a planning review is not ready for the next level. The words are identical. What differs is the position from which they are spoken, and the position decides whether uncertainty reads as wisdom or as weakness. This is a matter of power, and it has a double edge, because the people with the most licence to not-know are the people whose identities are most thoroughly made of decisions, and who therefore find it hardest. The chief executive can say she does not know. Everything in how she became chief executive has taught her not to mean it.

Lower down, the problem inverts. People closer to the work usually know more about what is uncertain, because they can see where the plan does not meet the ground. They are also the least able to say so, since not-knowing from below reads as incapacity, and since the organisation’s account, by the time it reaches them, has already been settled above. To voice uncertainty from that position is to put at risk the membership that depends on looking ready, and most people, reasonably, keep the uncertainty to themselves and carry out a plan they can see will not work. The result is a system in which uncertainty is most present where it can least be voiced, and most voiceable where it is least felt. The AI Transition Diagnostic asks whether leaders can say “I don’t know” without it costing them credibility, and what the most common response is when someone says they do not know how a change will affect their role. The pattern it is looking for is this one, and as Unknowing argues, the organisation’s refusal to let its vision be partial is the thing that keeps the pattern in place.

The reassurance deserves a closer look, because it is the irritable reach performed on someone else’s behalf. When a person says they do not know what a change means for them and the reply is that they should not worry, the question has been closed for them, by someone who does not know either. As Toxic Positivity at Work traces, the reassurance is offered in good faith and received as an instruction, and what it instructs is that the uncertainty is not to be held in company. Each person is then left to hold it alone, which is the one condition under which Bion thought it could not be held at all.

What makes it stable is what Keats saw in Dilke. The organisation does not only reward decisions. It builds identities out of them. A leader is, in the organisation’s eyes and increasingly in her own, the sum of what she has decided, and the next decision is both a contribution and a confirmation that she is still the person who decides. That is where the meaning of the role lives, and it is why the role cannot easily hold an open question. To stand in front of a situation and say that it has not yet revealed what it is would be to stand there as nobody at all. Dilke could not feel he had a personal identity unless he had made up his mind about everything. Most leadership cultures are built to produce Dilke. They produce him in great numbers, and he is always trying at the truth.

Keats’s quality was never meant as a method. He was describing what Shakespeare had and what made Shakespeare possible, and he was clear that it was rare. Bion’s version was a discipline that almost nobody can keep. The leadership literature’s version, the capacity to wait, is real and needed and disappearing from the places that need it most, because those places have arranged themselves so that waiting cannot be seen and a person who waits cannot be anyone. Teaching it is probably beyond any programme. What an organisation could do instead is harder to put on a slide: stop treating the decision as the proof that its leaders exist, and find out what its leaders are like when they are allowed, for a while, to be nobody.