Most public service chief executives we meet are remarkably good at handling uncertainty. All accept the truth that uncertainty is as certain as death and taxes. You deploy admirable reserves of personal resilience and optimism. At your best you embrace it, seeing in uncertainty the wriggle-room to create space to get things done.

You live every day in hugely complex systems, riven with uncertainty – devolution and health and social care integration to name but two. Boundaries are blurred, causation is difficult to prove, you cannot ‘solve’ problems definitively and it can be difficult to know whether you are winning or losing.