What strikes me is not just the avoidance of uncertainty, but how difficult it is to act in situations where both the information and the consequences are inherently unclear.
In practice, it’s rarely a question of choosing between a known and an unknown option, but of navigating ambiguity where neither the probabilities nor the outcomes are well understood.
That seems to be where many leaders get stuck, not simply because of bias, but because the situation itself resists clarity.
You are 100% right, Ragnar. In fact, I wrote a different article related to this.
I feel like a lot of people who avoid decisions (or make the worse one), aren't scared of risk, like is commonly thought. I feel like they're scared of uncertainty.
Check this out - and I'd love to know your thoughts:
This resonates, especially the distinction between risk and uncertainty, and how uncertainty becomes personal.
What I often see in practice is that the challenge is not just uncertainty itself, but the difficulty of making sense of the situation in the first place.
In those cases, it’s not only about tolerance for discomfort, but about orientation and about connecting what you’re seeing with where you’re trying to go.
Without that, even small, reversible bets can lose direction.
Curious how you think about that link between making sense and maintaining direction over time.
The line that reframed this entire piece for me was "the risk isn't that the decision might be wrong. The risk is that you might be wrong." That is where the real resistance lives.
I see this in leaders who have built their entire identity around being the person who gets it right.
Uncertainty does not threaten their strategy. It threatens their sense of self. And once identity is at stake, the brain will choose a predictable failure over an uncertain outcome every single time.
Interesting framing.
What strikes me is not just the avoidance of uncertainty, but how difficult it is to act in situations where both the information and the consequences are inherently unclear.
In practice, it’s rarely a question of choosing between a known and an unknown option, but of navigating ambiguity where neither the probabilities nor the outcomes are well understood.
That seems to be where many leaders get stuck, not simply because of bias, but because the situation itself resists clarity.
You are 100% right, Ragnar. In fact, I wrote a different article related to this.
I feel like a lot of people who avoid decisions (or make the worse one), aren't scared of risk, like is commonly thought. I feel like they're scared of uncertainty.
Check this out - and I'd love to know your thoughts:
https://www.thebestleadershipnewsletter.com/p/leadership-confidence-risk-and-uncertainty
This resonates, especially the distinction between risk and uncertainty, and how uncertainty becomes personal.
What I often see in practice is that the challenge is not just uncertainty itself, but the difficulty of making sense of the situation in the first place.
In those cases, it’s not only about tolerance for discomfort, but about orientation and about connecting what you’re seeing with where you’re trying to go.
Without that, even small, reversible bets can lose direction.
Curious how you think about that link between making sense and maintaining direction over time.
The line that reframed this entire piece for me was "the risk isn't that the decision might be wrong. The risk is that you might be wrong." That is where the real resistance lives.
I see this in leaders who have built their entire identity around being the person who gets it right.
Uncertainty does not threaten their strategy. It threatens their sense of self. And once identity is at stake, the brain will choose a predictable failure over an uncertain outcome every single time.