Power of constructive doubt: Why the best decision makers embrace uncertainty

Is uncertainty valuable?

“It is wise to take admissions of uncertainty seriously”, Daniel Kahneman noted, “but declarations of high confidence mainly tell you that an individual has constructed a coherent story in his mind, not necessarily that the story is true.”

We love to be right in our management decision-making. After all, our reputation depends on it. Our brain’s survival default programming is “I am dead-on correct. Here are the facts and figures data to support my view.” But what if the data is wrong, or the assumptions are false? Or, what happens when there is no hard data?

Is ‘don’t rock the boat’ the unspoken management mantra where you work? Most people don’t want to be seen as the disruptor who swims upstream against the current of conventional wisdom. After all, being the source of an upset or risking making a bad decision could impact one’s career prospects and ability to pay the mortgage. Isn’t it just better to keep quiet and just fit in?

Craving congruence – alignment

“Congruence is a social science term for cultural ‘fit’ among an institution’s components - values, goals, vision, self-concepts, and leadership styles. Since the 1980s, congruence has been a pillar of organisational theory.

An effective culture is both consistent and strong. When all signals point clearly in the same direction, it promotes self-reinforcing consistency, and people like consistency,” notes David Epstein.

“Business school students are widely taught to believe the congruence model, that a good manager can always align every element of work into a culture where all influences are mutually reinforcing—whether toward cohesion or individualism. But cultures can actually be too internally consistent. With incongruence, you’re building in cross-checks,” says psychologist Philip Tetlock, author of Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction.

We often tend to think that ambiguity, having a degree of uncertainty, is a bad thing in corporate decision- making. It’s understandable why we crave certainty, like salty tortilla chips. We love consistency and alignment. Dealing with paradox is a pain.

But research has shown that “the most effective leaders and organisations had range; they were, in effect, paradoxical. They could be demanding and nurturing, orderly and entrepreneurial, even hierarchical and individualistic, all at once.

Read: Sustainability can help organisations navigate uncertainty

A level of ambiguity, it seemed, was not harmful. In decision-making, it can broaden an organisation’s toolbox in a way that is uniquely valuable.

Philip Tetlock and Barbara Mellers showed that thinkers who tolerate ambiguity make the best forecasts; one of Tetlock’s former graduate students, University of Texas professor Shefali Patil, spearheaded a project with them to show that cultures can build in a form of ambiguity that forces decision makers to use more than one tool, and to become more flexible and learn more readily,” writes Epstein.

Challenger – launch or delay?

Classic example of an ability to make a launch, to go ahead, or delay, when there is no data right in front of you, in unusual circumstances, is the Challenger space shuttle.

Harvard Business School turned this into one of it’s most popular case studies, ‘Carter Racing’, using the Challenger events, but disguising them in a case where a team has to decide in one hour before the big championship race of the season, whether to have the car enter the race, where the engine has failed unpredictably in the past.

In the Challenger disaster, an explosion of the US space shuttle orbiter Challenger happened shortly after its launch from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on January 28, 1986. The disaster claimed the lives of seven astronauts. It is probably the most significant event in the history of spaceflight in terms of its impact on the general public and on the US space programme.

Even deeper was the impact on NASA. Blinded by the success of the early Shuttle flights, the Agency’s management had developed a careless attitude toward warnings coming from the engineering community.

NASA had committed the Shuttle to an impossible schedule even before it entered service to ensure funding. Over time, NASA management had grown increasingly impatient with the technical delays that operating such a complex machine required. NASA believed an unusually cold Florida morning should not stop a billion-dollar programme with a track record of success.

“The Columbia Accident Investigation Board concluded that NASA’s culture ‘emphasised chain of command, procedure, following the rules, and going by the book. While rules and procedures were essential for coordination, they had an unintended negative effect.’ Once again, “allegiance to hierarchy and procedure” had ended in disaster,” writes Epstein. A little arguing, pushing back is not a bad thing. It’s a healthy essential.

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