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?
It is a question I have been sitting with for years. Recently, it surfaced in an unexpected place: in the public outcry over three elephants transferred to Osaka under an institutional agreement that was, on paper, entirely sound.
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. Across Southeast Asia’s social impact sector, we are being asked to deliver measurable results at an accelerating pace. Funders, boards, and stakeholders want results fast. In that environment, uncertainty is easily mistaken for weakness.
Over two decades working alongside climate-vulnerable communities, indigenous partners, and children with diverse learning needs, I have learned that speed can create distance and distance can distort reality.
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.
One example is the indigenous women our Foundation partners with: from Orang Asli Jakun communities in Johor, and communities in rural Sabah. For years, well-meaning outsiders arrived with templates: training curricula, enterprise models, timelines tied to grant cycles. These communities already knew what they needed. What they lacked was not direction, but partners willing to slow down, listen, and let the pace of the work belong to them.
A more recent example plays out in full public view. In March 2026, three elephants: Dara, Amoi, and Kelat (DAK), were transferred to Osaka under a 25-year agreement signed in 2021. On paper, it was a “logframe” success, but when reports surfaced on Kelat’s damaged tusk and leg injuries, the “tidy” narrative began to unravel.
The public outcry that followed was not a complication. It was the feedback the process had never made room for. When discomfort is ignored, we silence minority voices and rush into quick fixes that eventually fail.
Discomfort as an ethical discipline
How then do we resist the rush to resolve?
Sitting with discomfort is an ethical choice, 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 people, and in the case of DAK, the animals, that we are meant to serve.
The petitions demanding local conservation at Kuala Gandah Elephant Conservation Centre are not merely “noise” but vital feedback loops and safeguards against overconfidence. They are signals that the work is still in conversation with reality.
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. 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
At Taarana, Malaysia’s first affordable education centre for neurodivergent children, our educators begin every term with a premise many institutions resist: the child in front of us may teach us as much about education as any curriculum can. Progress here is rarely linear, and that is the point. The work endures precisely because we have built the discomfort of not-knowing into its design.
The same principle runs through the Maharani School Programme, where girls from B40 communities in Malaysia, build confidence not because we arrive with a fixed definition of empowerment, but because the programme adjusts to what they tell us they need.
In both cases, the mechanism is the same: iteration over assumption, listening over prescribing.
Conclusion
Sitting with discomfort, ambiguity, the absence of neat answers and a 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.
Datin Seri Umayal Eswaran is the Chairperson of RYTHM Foundation and the founder of Taarana. The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect those of Sinar Daily.