What matters?
I recently found myself in a conversation about school catchment areas. Ofsted ratings, which postcode gets you through which school gate, and the property prices that go with that. There's a lot to plan for with schooling, even before your child can string a sentence together.
The advice I gave? The most important schooling a child can have right now isn't only about academic attainment. It's an environment where they learn to regulate their emotions, where pastoral care is taken seriously, where mistakes aren’t the end of the world, and where progress is measured against where they were last term, not against the child at the next desk. The kind of things that will set children up to navigate ambiguity.
Why? We live in a world where we have no way of knowing what we’ll be living through next week, let alone for the next generation.
When my son was three, we started playing coding games together - I was 100% sure it was the essential skill for his future, especially after spending years in tech publishing.
Fast forward to now, and my husband is helping him build a diary app on Lovable. The kid isn't writing code; he's deciding what the app should do, describing it, and checking what comes back. The foundations held; the furnishings changed.
Meanwhile, two years ago I started a practical data analysis course. Whilst I originally resisted leaning on AI, I realised the more critical skill wasn't actually running the analysis (which is kind of annoying frankly, because I do like actually building things), it was understanding what was possible and how to do it - the acumen and reasoning behind prompting well and reviewing what comes back.
The specific tools keep evolving. Coding languages and analysis packages turned out to be the furnishings: useful, but swapped out as the world changed. The reasoning underneath, knowing what's possible and judging what comes back, is more like the layout: harder to change, and it shapes where everything else goes. And emotional regulation, being cared for, measuring your own progress: those are the foundations.
The thing that never changes, is change itself.
The risk is us thinking of ambiguity as if it's weather: something that happens to us, that we wait out until things "settle down", or the raincloud clears. They don't, though, do they? Restructures, AI rewriting how work gets done, governments and policy changing direction, markets shifting under our feet: this is our climate, folks.
So the skill that matters most isn't one you can only use in certainty. It's knowing what to build on when nothing stays still.
My advice is to treat any type of decision making in this environment like building a house. The foundations are concrete: you really have to get them right, because changing them later means ripping them out and starting again. Expensive to build, expensive to tear out.
The layout and plumbing can change, sure, but it takes quite a lot of effort. Wall colours - a weekend (or 30 hours including 3 hours sleep if you have ADHD tendencies like moi 👩🎨 ) and a few tins of paint. The furnishings? Well, they can be swapped in and out at will.
I approach challenges by working out which layer each decision sits in; I agonise over the foundations. Whilst I really do want to spend planning the furnishings, I know what matters first - so I don't lose any sleep over the cushions. (Though likely have pinned 20k pages for later).
To build a home
At work, I've found the foundations are built by how you show up and how clearly you define what you're building.
Steadiness comes first. When things are uncertain, people don't look at the blueprint. They look at you. If you're anxious, they'll be anxious; if you're steady, they'll borrow your steadiness until they find their own.
Each time I’m thrown a curveball, there are three things I ponder. What do I actually know? What am I assuming? What’s mine to control? The answer to the last one is normally smaller than my ego would like, to be honest! Though, I can tell you it’s both freeing and also helps to create momentum in areas that would otherwise make you pause for too long.
I also had to get super comfortable admitting when I don’t know something with a plan to find out. You rarely need the lines in picture, as long as you have a way to react to new information. It’s also about knowing what you NEED to know now 👇
Know what you're building and who for before you choose the materials. Special projects are ambiguity in its purest form. I do love them. You're handed two things: a blank blueprint and a sense of urgency. The strategy that works for me is separating what you're building, from how you'll build and execute it. You need to be sure on what it is, who'll live in it and why. Stay loose on the methods, structure and materials at this point.
On a recent program, my starting point wasn't necessarily knowing what my finished house would look like. But we could agree the foundations were built on context. The rest came easily after that.
When that was done, I started small - a diagram, a one-page model, a pilot. Each one becomes a marker of progress. It's the individual-attainment idea from the classroom: you stop measuring yourself against a perfect plan that never existed, and start measuring whether you're further on than you were last month, and that you have learnt a lot in the process.
Patience holds it together. Patience is so underrated, and hard to maintain as everything speeds up. It’s too easily confused with passivity, which can be frustrating. Patience is knowing which decisions need making now and which get better in the fullness of time. It's knowing not to set the whole construction crew loose on the entire thing before you know the layout will work. Maybe that's by breaking big decisions into a series of small ones. Piloting and learning. Speaking from experience: rushing to false certainty on foundations feels brilliant at the time, but it's rather awful and time consuming undoing it later.
Importantly, look after the people building and living in it. This matters so much. What schools call pastoral care? At work it's the same thing - in times of change people need to know someone is paying attention to them as people, not just as a line in the plan. Checking in, being honest, commiserating on what's hard, and protecting space to think aren't soft extras. They're what keeps a team able to perform and enjoy their work when the ground is moving. And the customers you’re building for need to feel that what you’re creating is somewhere they want to call home.
A well-suitated four-bedroom house with room to extend
(Great public transport links, good schools)
Good foundations also give you room to grow. Ask yourself: are they built so you can add a carefully planned extension later with ease? How does that impact how you'll plan your layout?
Imagine, for a second, getting the foundations wrong. You build on top of the wrong foundations, and every new floor makes the cracks worse. You may keep extending up and out until you've lost the garden. The house doesn’t work. Then it either stays there, derelict, or gets blown up.
Don't let yourself end up with one of those upside-down houses at a fun fair. Impossible to live in, and let’s be honest, makes you feel a bit sick.
From not sure to execution
If things are feeling FOGGY! right now, this is the learning I’d share:
Figure out the foundations first. Ask which decisions everything else will rest on, and which are hard to undo. Make those carefully and know your tolerance for ambiguity.
Name what you know, what you assume, and what you control. Write all three down. Then sort them: which are foundations, and which are actually just table runners?
Know what you're building, but flex how. Agree what must be true before anyone thinks about what materials to use.
Build your model house and show people around. Let small, real evidence be the milestone before you break ground.
Measure your own progress. Above it all, compare your progress to last month, not to a mansion you thought you'd have yesterday.
And back to what matters.
I obviously don't think we should stop caring about academic attainment. But if I could choose the foundations for my son to navigate whatever the workforce will be, it would be: the ability to sit in uncertainty without panicking, to look after themselves and each other while they work it out, have fun in the process of learning and problem solving, and to keep on moving.
Some skills will keep changing. That's fine. They're now the big furnishings: the dinner table, the sofa, the beds - still 100% worth investing in, chosen for the house you've built and refreshed as it changes. Others, like reasoning and communication, are the layout: harder to change, so worth building well. The foundations are the curriculum we aren't formally taught. Most of us are learning it on the job, one restructure, one blank page, one "I don’t know" at a time.
