By Datin Seri Umayal Eswaran

Earlier this year, on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting in Davos, a deceptively simple question was raised: in an age when everyone is trying to tell stories about impact, whose stories are actually being heard?

The honest answer is that the stories that get heard are often the ones easiest to resolve. The neat arc which gives the quick win. The solution offered before the problem has finished speaking.

Storytelling, in our work, is not a branding exercise. It is a listening practice. Listening, if done properly, is uncomfortable because it slows you down.

That discomfort is not abstract. It shows up in the way communities insist on refusing outside forces to define them. Lumad schools in Mindanao have resisted imposed curricula and political pressures, choosing instead to sustain cultural identity through community‑led education. In Coron, Palawan, fisherfolk and women’s associations became the lead of mangrove rehabilitation that restored marine life and created a women‑managed marine protected area. 

Neither of these came from a donor template or top-down plan. Both grew from communities that stayed to reconnect livelihoods with ecosystems.

Real leadership is not about eliminating ambiguity, but staying with complexity long enough to understand what it is actually saying.

When comfort creates distance

While distance is comfortable, proximity is not. The closer you stand to a problem, the more contradictions you have to carry, and the less tidy your conclusions become.

Lumad educators and coastal leaders show us that proximity means carrying contradictions, between tradition and modernity, between donor timelines and community priorities. Their insistence on discomfort is not resistance for its own sake, but a demand that solutions reflect lived realities rather than imposed templates.

When discomfort is ignored, minority perspectives get silenced and stakeholders get pushed toward a quick resolution that later unravels.

Discomfort as an ethical discipline

How then do we resist the rush to resolve?

Sitting with discomfort is an ethical choice and a reminder that this work is not about us, but about respecting realities we cannot control.

Premature certainty is not just a strategic error. It is ethically risky for the people we serve. Feedback loops are not a sign of fragility; they are safeguards against overconfidence.

In the Philippines, where leaders are under pressure to deliver inclusive growth and climate resilience, holding power responsibly means accepting that the clearest path forward is not always immediately visible.

It is ethically risky for the people we serve. Feedback loops are not a sign of fragility; they are safeguards against overconfidence. Holding power responsibly means accepting that the clearest path forward is not always immediately visible.

The double bind for women leaders

Holding power responsibly is already difficult. For women, it is often costlier.

Despite relatively strong female representation in leadership, advancement into senior roles is still marked by persistent structural and cultural barriers. And even once those positions are assumed, the pressures do not disappear. 

Women leaders are expected to project certainty and confidence at every moment, while facing sharper scrutiny than male counterparts for the same performance. Media framing compounds this: we are routinely characterised as either too ambitious or not ambitious enough. Visible uncertainty, which is simply an honest response to a complex problem, becomes especially risky.

For women in leadership, sitting with complexity demands the courage to hold that discomfort publicly, without collapsing toward premature resolution.

What discomfort looks like in practice

This means building iteration and reflection into programmes from the outset as a genuine mechanism to listen and adapt.

Community‑based initiatives in the Philippines show us that resilience comes from humility. Lumad schools in Mindanao have taught us that education endures when curricula adapt to cultural identity rather than impose external templates. Coastal communities in Palawan have shown that climate resilience is stronger when mangrove restoration is led by fisherfolk and women’s associations instead of donor‑driven timelines.

These examples remind us that empowerment is not a fixed definition but a process of listening and adjusting to what communities identify as priorities.

Leaders with a high tolerance for ambiguity tend to make better decisions under complexity, knowing that a timely but poor decision is worse than a slower, sound one.

Conclusion

Sitting with discomfort, with ambiguity, with the absence of neat answers, with process that refuses to be tidy is not a failure. It is the discipline.

The first question impact leaders should ask is not “What is the answer?” but “What don’t we yet understand?”

A story without accountability becomes performance. Data without humanity creates distance. When we let narrative and evidence inform one another, and resist the rush to resolve, we build  an impact that lasts.

The most responsible leaders are not those who resolve complexity fastest, but those who respect it long enough to learn from it. Only by staying close to notice who is still waiting can we be sure we are bringing anyone with us.

About the Author

Datin Seri Umayal Eswaran is the Chairperson of RYTHM Foundation, the social impact initiative of the QI Group. Over the last two decades, she has championed initiatives across South Asia, ASEAN, and Sun Saharan Africa in education, gender rights, and economic opportunity for underserved communities. She is also the founder of Taarana, Malaysia’s first affordable education centre for children with diverse learning needs.