Capacity for Change is a Muscle, and Not Everyone's Been to the Gym.
I used to think my comfort with uncertainty was just... who I am. Turns out it's more like my cardio. I have a lot of it. Other people don't. And for a long time I quietly assumed that meant something about them.
I can hold a direction without a map. Tell me the "where," skip the "how," and I'm genuinely fine. I'll figure it out as I go. Test something, see what breaks, adjust, keep moving. This is true at work and it's true for the rest of my life. This isn’t new for me. When I was 24, I decided I wanted to see Europe. So I saved some money, got a holiday work visa, packed up my whole apartment and booked a flight to Europe. I wasn’t moving there, I just didn’t know when I’d be back, I didn’t figure it all out, I just planned the things I would need to be able to figure it out.
It's only in the last year or so that I understood this properly. Not as "how I am," but as a specific capacity. A skill I happen to have a lot of, not a baseline everyone else is failing to meet.
And once that clicked, I started seeing it everywhere at work.
The Overhaul
We recently rebuilt our education program. We moved away from a structured, formal training system into something more self-directed. Less step-by-step manual, more framework you build inside of.
To me, that felt like freedom. To some of the people living through it, it felt like the floor was disappearing.
The previous program was very structured with days and times for training with a specific time frame to start and finish. Now there is flexibility in the schedule, and the trainers. The trainees can negotiate with trainers for specific skills they would like to learn.
“But when will I do my training?” was asked more than once. Because setting up their time on their own was new and it required autonomy.
Here's the part I wasn't expecting. This split wasn't just showing up in the trainees. It was showing up in the trainers too.
Some people started asking a lot of questions. Not because they were resistant, but because they were quietly building their own scaffolding, one question at a time, so they'd feel safe enough to take a step.
Some people leaned back. Without the old structure physically pushing them forward, they just... didn't move. Or moved very, very carefully.
And some people jumped in with both feet and started running before anyone had finished explaining the plan.
Same change. Same room. Completely different starting points.
What the Research Actually Says
I went looking for something to back up what I was noticing, because I didn't want this to just be a "vibe." Turns out there's a whole body of research on this, and it's more specific than I expected.
The concept is called tolerance of ambiguity, and it's exactly what it sounds like: how comfortable a person is working with novelty, incomplete information, or conflicting signals. And the numbers are a little humbling. According to research summarized by the Australian HR Institute, fewer than one in ten people naturally score high on tolerance for ambiguity. So if you're someone who thrives without a map, you are, statistically, the exception in the room, not the standard everyone else should be hitting.
The part that really validated what I was seeing with the trainers and trainees splitting into three camps. A 2025 study tracked 275 project managers over several weeks and found that tolerance of ambiguity isn't fixed. It moves week to week, and those shifts were connected to people's mood, how well they were adapting, and how their work was actually progressing. In other words, this isn't a trait you either have or don't. It's a state, shaped by what's going on around a person in that specific week. Which explains a lot about why the same trainer who jumped in confidently on the new framework might ask a dozen careful questions about something else entirely.
There's a similar pattern in the older research on self-directed learning readiness. It's measurable, it varies a lot between people, and importantly, it can shift and improve over time with awareness and practice. So when someone leans back and needs more structure right now, that's not a fixed limitation. It's a current starting point. Different thing entirely.
None of this is really about intelligence, commitment, or whether someone "gets it." It's about capacity, and capacity is unevenly distributed and constantly shifting.
What I'm Trying to Unlearn
Here's the uncomfortable one. When people don't move at my pace, my default read used to be resistance. I'm working on unlearning that.
It's not resistance. It's often just a different starting point.
So instead of pushing everyone forward at the same speed, or over-explaining at the people who are leaning back, I've started asking a much simpler question: what do you need to move forward?
That one question has done more for me than any amount of reassurance or re-explaining. Hearing from more than one person that all they needed was for me to be willing to check in when they got off track helped me slow down and hear more of the potential challenges.
It gets underneath the surface behaviour, whether that's the twentieth question or the total silence, and it goes straight to what the person actually needs to take the next step.
The Real Shift
Recognizing that people have different capacities for change doesn't mean slowing everything down to match the most cautious person in the room. That's not the lesson here.
The lesson is that my comfort with uncertainty is mine. It's not the baseline, and it's definitely not the finish line everyone else needs to reach to be "doing it right."
The most sustainable change I've seen happen isn't the change that moves fastest. It's the change people are invited into, instead of dragged along behind.
Summary: Capacity for change isn't fixed, it's a specific skill that varies from person to person and shifts depending on what's going on for them at the time. Assuming people who move slower are being resistant misses what's actually happening, and asking "what do you need to move forward" gets to it faster than reassurance ever will.
Key points:
Comfort with ambiguity and uncertainty is a measurable capacity, not a character flaw or a baseline, and the research shows most people don't have a lot of it naturally.
That capacity moves over time and with context. It's a state as much as a trait, which is why the same person can be confident about one change and cautious about another.
The fastest way through a change isn't pushing everyone at the same pace. It's asking each person what they specifically need, then building the path with them instead of ahead of them.
