Every field has its version of mystery. In religion, mystery is held as sacred. In science, it’s approached as a frontier. In leadership, it often shows up as something to be solved quickly — or ignored.

But mystery isn’t something you can’t know. It’s something endlessly knowable. And for those of us trying to lead in times of uncertainty, it might be one of the few forms of truth we can actually trust.

I was recently invited to facilitate a retreat with 30 of the world’s leading quantum materials physicists. Their adaptive challenge was not technical, but philosophical: whether to shift their organizing purpose from “science for the sake of science” to “science for the sake of humanity.”

The distinction isn’t academic. In the United States alone, nearly a trillion dollars go annually to scientific research. Roughly 20% of that comes from public sources. With that public investment comes a growing demand to make science more responsive — more oriented toward tangible outcomes and societal impact.

Some scientists welcome that. Others resist. For many, “science for humanity” sounds like a euphemism for profit, politics or premature applications. There’s an unspoken fear that wonder, if made to justify itself, might not survive. The lab becomes another grant-driven output factory. The scientist becomes a fundraiser with a lab coat.

That tension isn’t new. It has surfaced at every major pivot in the scientific enterprise. But what struck me in this retreat was how human the whole thing was. The physicists weren’t just debating language. They were debating identity. Purpose. What it means to be part of something larger than oneself without being swallowed by it.

I remembered myself at nineteen, working at Argonne National Laboratory, running experiments on superconductors cooled to near absolute zero. The physics was wild — magnetic levitation, frictionless materials, quantum oddities that made your brain feel rubbery. But what I remember most isn’t the science. It’s the awe. And the humor. Spraying liquid nitrogen on our shoes and stomping our laces into ice. It was absurd. And hilarious. And maybe, in some weird way, essential.

The scientists in that room didn’t need convincing that their work mattered. But they did need space to remember why it did.

We don’t often talk about science as a spiritual act. But it is. The method may be precise, but the motivation is often devotional. Not to a god, but to a mystery. A mystery that doesn’t recede with every answer, but expands.

The same is true in leadership. We tend to think of leadership as decision-making, action-taking, truth-telling. And it is. But it’s also standing in complexity without defaulting to simplification. Holding a question long enough for it to shift. Choosing not to rush clarity.

Mystery, in that sense, isn’t a failure of knowledge. It’s a practice of attention.

Leadership at its best shares something vital with science at its best: the ability to sit at the edge of the known without retreating or pretending. It turns fear into curiosity. Skepticism into humility. The unknown into a site of creativity.

Of course, there’s nothing romantic about uncertainty when you’re in the middle of it. For most leaders, the unknown is where risks accumulate and credibility erodes. But part of the work is learning to stay there anyway.

Technical Leadership Problems vs Adaptive Leadership Problems

In Adaptive Leadership, we talk about distinguishing technical problems from adaptive ones. Technical problems can be solved by expertise. Adaptive challenges require us to change — to rethink values, beliefs, habits. That work can’t be done by downloading more information. It requires a different relationship to not knowing.

The physicists I worked with knew more about the physical universe than I ever will. But in many ways, their challenge was the same as every leadership team I’ve worked with: how to act when the path forward is unclear, when your old frames don’t fit, when what’s needed is not mastery, but imagination.

They weren’t asking me for answers. They were asking for a space in which better questions could surface.

In that room, the real shift came not from agreement, but from a shared willingness to wrestle. To sit in the tension between scientific freedom and social responsibility. Between the purity of inquiry and the messiness of application. Between awe and accountability.

No one left with a final conclusion. But something did move.

Maybe that’s the point. We often think of truth as a landing place. But in the deepest sense, truth is what moves us. And mystery is what makes us movable.

Opening the Door to Adaptive Leadership

As leaders, we’re taught to seek clarity. But clarity that comes too quickly is usually control in disguise. The kind of clarity worth trusting is forged in uncertainty. It asks something of us. It makes us different.

That doesn’t mean we glorify confusion or reject decisions. It means we treat complexity with the respect it deserves. We stay curious a little longer. We stop pretending we know when we don’t. We build the muscle of discernment instead of the reflex of reaction.

And in that practice, something changes. Mystery stops being a threat. It becomes a teacher.

Most of us aren’t trained to live that way. We’re trained to solve, to finish, to move on. But some things aren’t meant to be closed. They’re meant to be lived.

One of the physicists shared something that stayed with me. He said, “The more I study the universe, the more it refuses to be pinned down. It behaves like it wants to remain mysterious. And the strangest thing is — that doesn’t frustrate me anymore. It steadies me.”

Leadership isn’t always about seeing what others can’t. Sometimes it’s about staying where others won’t. Staying long enough for a new kind of seeing to emerge.

The universe is still 95% dark matter and dark energy. Still unlit. Still unknown. And yet we go on, investigating it. Building theories. Smashing particles. Asking better questions.

Maybe that’s enough.

Maybe that’s everything.