Uncertainty is Not the Enemy

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I'm Renee Brown. And I've had 'em, Grant. We're going to talk today at 'em about the word ringing in the halls of every organization that I am walking through at this point. Which is?

Uncertainty. I'm a 100% certain that uncertainty is the level of uncertainty and the velocity of change right now is tough. Not just in organizations, but people are grappling with it in everyday life. The world is in flux.

The world is in flux. So why don't we do this? We'll start with some listener questions. We had many questions come in through social media. I think you grab some off Spotify.

Let's dig into some of the questions that we received and unpack some of the answers. And also I want to say shout out to some of the learning, I really learned some stuff from these conversations. So I'm grateful for that.

Let's do that for the first half.

And then we will springboard from one of the questions into the second half of the podcast today on uncertainty. I mean, there's no faster way to a diverse heart than to use the word springboard. I mean, I mean, I mean, I was just trying to make your day. Okay.

Done. Daymade. Okay. So I posted on LinkedIn one of our takeaways from our episode was episode two. We talked about pre-mortems and we talked about pre-mortems as a risk assessment tool.

So we are launching a project and we ask ourselves, during the launch, hey, if it's six months or a year from now and this thing's gone to shit, what we would be talking about,

“then, and why can't we talk about it now and what should we be talking about now?”

And we actually did an episode two, our own pre-mortem on our podcast. So I posted this, why are you laughing? Well, one because we're still here. Yeah, I mean, we have made it so far so good. It was helpful.

Sure. Well, I found it helpful, too. And it really did leave me thinking this should happen in every important relationship, not just in work decisions. I think that new parents should talk about what are the things that are most likely to

screw up our kids in two and five and ten years and how do we avoid that? And I just love how universal the fear of failing is. And I love this as a tool to try to prevent failure by anticipating some of the things you could have prevented. Yeah, and I love that like, I love the two questions that I use a lot in a pre-mortem

because one of them is, what should we be talking about?

“And the other one is why aren't we talking about it right now?”

And I got to tell you, the people who work in risk are big fans of the pre-mortem and the LinkedIn, all the risk assessment people are like, now you're speaking my language.

that Stephen, who is an executive and leadership coach, we got into a conversation and it

got the most kind of like, yes, please take this to the episode. We want to hear you and Adam talk about this. So I'm going to read it.

“It's going to take a minute or so to get through it, but I think it's a really important”

framing. It's what stood out to me, and this is an R. podcast episode two, is how often teams treat risk is something to review instead of something to reveal. I've seen leaders wait until the post-mortem, not because they don't care, but because naming risk early feels like slowing momentum are questioning the plan.

But underneath that, it's usually something deeper, protecting confidence in the room.

The shift happens when risk becomes a shared language, not a personal judgment. It's when teams stop managing perceptions, start building real traction. In my experience, the best primar amortems aren't about predicting failure. They're about creating enough safety for people to say what they already know, but haven't said yet.

I'm curious, where do you see the real friction show up more and identifying the risks or

“in creating the space where people say, spill safe enough to speak them out loud?”

Let me say that again, because it's really, we know that we know from the research and we know from our own experiences. I mean, I do this all day, all day long for years. I'm with senior teams facilitating these. We know there's friction around a pre-mortem.

Stevens question, where does it show up more and identifying the risks or creating the space where people feel safe enough to speak them out loud? This question of, is it really new information that you're excavating in a pre-mortem or is it psychological safety that you're built, you know, where is the real friction? This was the question.

I mean, across 80% of the comments. Can I just vote for both right off the bat? 100%, so that's actually how I answered him. Because I want to say, and there were some people with whom I disagreed in the comments who said it's nothing but psychological safety.

The friction is all about everybody, already knows what the risks are and no one is saying it because the friction is just about the room is not safe enough. And I absolutely, wholeheartedly disagree.

“I think a good pre-mortem is about excavating new information that requires new skills”

that very few leaders have today because the world is new. And those are the skills of peaking around the corner and tits of a Tory thinking, situational

awareness, temporal awareness, systems thinking, critical thinking.

I would say, if in a good pre-mortem, you are building these skills, they're not strong muscles, you're doing it as a team and it cannot be done without psychological safety. You're building both at the same time, which is why these are best done probably facilitated. What do you think? I think that, I mean, that's so well put.

I think it reminds me of one of the first projects I ever did as a as a young organizational psychologist was studying a bookstore you probably remember, called Borders. Yeah. And I watched that company go out of business and there may have been people in the company who saw Amazon coming, but it was not on the radar as a major risk and I thought so many

times if they had the skills to do the pre-mortem. Well, it would have been very comfortable saying, hey, what if this all goes digital? What if, like, what if physical bookstores are not even necessary anymore? Which I don't agree with by the way, it's a premise, I'm glad we have physical bookstores. I think there's a place for them in the world.

But it wasn't the problem there, I don't think was a lack of psychological safety. I think they had this safety and they just had a lot of people locked into the mindset that books are a physical objects that you want to go and browse in a store. And there's a study of, you know, Polaroid going down the same road, they just could not let go of, this is a, a trips us and Gavetti paper where they do a deep dive into

what went wrong at Polaroid. And people could not let go of the business model that we sell film. Like they had digital imaging technology, they knew how to build digital cameras.

And they, you know, they failed because of it.

“And so, you know, obviously, if you can't get people to feel comfortable speaking up because”

they're afraid they're going to damage their reputations or their relationships or risk their careers, that is a psychological safety challenge. But surrounding the psychological safety problem is not enough in and of itself to get all of the new ideas on the table that, that raised problems, then, that lead to new solutions. I mean, so I think I'm agreeing with you.

Yeah, I think we're, I think we're an agreement. I think one of the things that is interesting, Stephen, Stephen, I had this big long thread. One of the things that he asked, he says, I'm curious how you approach the balance, the psychological safety and skills balance. At the sea level, do you intentionally develop anticipatory thinking and psychological safety

in parallel, or have you seen one reliably unlock the other first?

And I'm going to get very practical right now and people won't love it and that's great. I think it's because I wasn't athlete and I think it's because I do a lot of work in sports that I approach this in a very practical way, which is this.

“If you want to play to win, whatever it is that you're trying to win, market share,”

a competitive advantage, stock, impact if you're an NGO nonprofit, do a lot of work there. If you want to win, you must create an environment of productive challenge. You must want to win more than you want to protect your ego, period. So I do not come in first with psychological safety or the skills. I come in outcome focused with performance.

What is it that you want to do? Increase organic growth, whatever your thing is, then let's talk about two things. What does it look like to play to win? And secondly, what does it look like to play not to lose? And let me tell you what teams do who play not to lose. There's no productive challenge.

They don't have hard conversations. They allow negative contagion. And so for me, it's about it's almost design thinking. It's almost tell me what's keeping you up at night. Tell me what's on your heart in mind and tell me what winning looks like.

And then I will tell you the collection of skillsets, mindsets and behaviors that we're going to need to see in this room for that to happen.

“I think what's so effective about that is you're then you're not pitching them on a culture”

change or set of practices that you're passionate about, that they need to adopt. No, you are finding out what their goals are.

And then helping them solve the, you're basically helping them clear the obstacles that

are in the middle of their path to their goal. Yeah, and it's, I think it's really interesting because I, I'm going to, I'm going to do a shout out right now for two people in tandem, actually, and the Edmondston's work on psychological safety. I think is you, you can't have high performance without it.

And I also want to shout out, I could Bethelia's new book, Anchor to Line in Accountable because I think it's a tool for building it. I think, you know, having a team that's anchored in their values cares about the alignment between, and this is a big one in primordms, it cares about the alignment between intention and impact, meaning I'm trying to engage in task conflict and make us better, but I've

moved over to emotional conflict and been shitty to you, and now I'm going to make a repair for that because it gets in the way of winning, and then last is accountable to each other. One of the things that we didn't talk about when we talked about primordms that came up a lot in the comments that I really loved was a pre-mortem really increases team ownership of the project, you know, and so, you know, to Amy Edmondston who put the concept of

the psychological safety out into the world, and then to Iko who's got new work coming as a coach and a facilitator about how she builds it tactically. This is playing to win to me. Support for the show comes from Quintes. The Kiwi Solid wardrobe is to focus on quality over quantity.

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Introducing Odo, it's the only business software you'll ever need. It's an all-in-one fully integrated platform that makes your work easier. CRM, accounting, inventory, e-commerce, and more. And the best part, Odo replaces multiple expensive platforms for a fraction of the cost.

“That's why over thousands of businesses have made the switch.”

So why not you? Try Odo for free at Odo.com. That's OdoO.com. Support for the show comes from Odo. Running a business is hard enough.

So why make it harder with it doesn't different apps that don't talk to each other? Introducing Odo, it's the only business software you'll ever need. It's an all-in-one fully integrated platform that makes your work easier. CRM, accounting, inventory, e-commerce, and more. And the best part, Odo replaces multiple expensive platforms for a fraction of the cost.

That's why over thousands of businesses have made the switch. So why not you? Try Odo for free at Odo.com. That's OdoO.com. Well, that actually is a good segue to one of our other questions.

I love it. I love it. I love it. I love it. This is a question that this is one of my most thought-provoking and popular comments.

This came in from Eva, who works in customer success. And she's asking about why people continue to stay committed to organizations, to relationships that lack psychological safety and that might be crushing their souls a little bit. So she says I'd be curious to hear a conversation about why people stay loyal to systems that quietly exhaust them.

Many people can clearly see when something in their environment no longer aligns with their values or even their well-being. Yet instead of leaving or confronting it, they adapt to it and sometimes even end up defending it.

“What psychological forces make us protect structures that are slowly draining us?”

I thought this was a profound question. Thank you, Eva. Yeah, I hear it all. I hear it very often. I can't, you go first.

All right, I'm more curious about what you're going to say. But I'm going to say gladi. I know what I'm going to say to you, but I'm very curious about what you're going to say. All right, I'll kick us off.

So the first thing that came to mind on this was I was thinking about the classic

Hirschman framework that would be in Cooper then elaborated, Exit Voice Loyalty Neglect. Wait, wait. Say that again. Exit. Exit Voice Loyalty Neglect.

Okay. Oh, yeah. Those are four possible responses to dissatisfaction. If you're unhappy in a relationship, in a job, in a country for that matter, Exit is you leave.

Voice is you speak up and try to change it and fix it. Loyalty is you bite your tongue and you do your best. Anyway, and neglect is you do the bare minimum to not blow it up. That's like the office space response for those who are fans.

“I think that for a lot of people, what happens is they feel trapped.”

They're in a relationship that they don't feel they can leave. They're in a job where they don't think they have alternatives. And so Exit is just not an option. And there's not enough psychological safety to voice. They think that it might damage the relationship or it might lose them their job.

And so they don't speak up or they've tried and their voice is fallen on deaf years.

And so people start cycling through their options and they're basically left with Loyalty

or neglect. And for many people, Loyalty is a matter of integrity. I am not the kind of person who half-ass is it. I'm not the kind of person who does the bare minimum. And so what I'm going to do is I'm going to keep giving this organization my all.

And at that point, what kicks in is cognitive dissonance. And you get what, I call it just like John Jost and Mauser and Benoggi have called

the more you are persuading yourself, I care.

This is important to me. And the more trapped you are in the sense that but I've invested so much. I now have all these sound costs. And but I am really curious to hear your your reaction to this. I just want to overlay.

I have become convinced recently that there is a gender difference in this tendency. There's a pretty sizable body of evidence that women are more likely to internalize distress. And say, well, this is on me, like, this is my problem. And therefore, I just need to, you know, I need to keep trying to solve it or fix it in my life. But I still owe something to the organization or the other person.

I have a duty of care, I have a duty of responsibility. Whereas men are more likely to externalize problems and say, you know what, that's not the right person. That's not the right job. That's not the right organization for me.

I'm out. Over to you. Okay, I don't think this is gender. I think it's experiential, maybe. So, and but maybe gender two.

So Eva, right, that's who asked. So one thing I would say is when we observe, I would say exit voice loyalty or neglect. I would say there, I would add something to this. And I would say necessity.

“And so I'm reminded of so many things when I think about that question.”

The first thing I'm reminded of is, like, a personal story for me when my parents, my whole

family life, like, blew up, like a cartoon where you just have one of those things, you're like, it just kind of blew up. And I found myself in school and putting myself through school, no money broke, no real support from my parents who were just both, like, a whole family was just dissolving. And at some point, you know, I sold my car to pay tuition.

I took a bus to wait tables, I cleaned houses on the weekend. And I waited tables at a place that was probably one of the most abusive places I've ever worked. Like, the kind where the restaurant manager would throw you up against the wall if you dropped a plate or something, and it wasn't about, like, I couldn't exit.

Like, that's how I paid my rent. That's how I paid my tuition. That's how I couldn't exit. Your voice was dangerous. I wasn't loyal.

I hated them, and neglect wasn't really an option because it was too scary if you didn't do your job well. And so I think when we see someone in that situation, if the question, if the answer consideration set is exit voice loyalty or neglect, I think we're forgetting about, you know, I'm a single mom, my kid has leukemia, this is my health insurance, and I can't leave.

The job market is not favorable, and a paycheck is a priority.

“So I think the most important thing I would say to this question is, and even demonstrate”

this in the question, get curious, rather than judgmental, because the question, whenever I hear the question as a social worker, why don't you leave? I go directly to my work in domestic violence and sexual assault, where women in that position know that the majority of people who are killed in that position are killed while leaving.

And so people don't leave for a lot of reasons, which is why my favorite question is tell me about what's going on and what to support for me look like. Because I think there are, and it does get gendered very quickly, but it's not just women who have to put food on the table and have health insurance for a sick kid or a million other reasons, but I think getting curious about people's thinking and people's lived experiences

is the most important thing when I see this.

And sometimes it is real desperation and a lack of choices, and related to that too, I think I would add another one, which one is just, you know, economic reality, I would add to the list, but I'd also add the list, some combination of privilege and agency.

“Like I think about if my, when a my children was caught in the position, bartending and”

waiting tables that I was caught in, they would never have to stay there for more than five

Yeah, and I think in today's employment environment, it's hard to find a job right now.

“I mean, it's really hard to ping on what your skill set is in your industry is, so I think”

this is when our commitment to curiosity really pays off. All right, so we go to the next question. Yeah, let's do it. A really beautiful question about the apologizing. The person wrote, "I know the apologies between you and Adam were personal.

Is there anything you can tell us about repair that we could learn from? Is there any, are there any like toolkits or ideas about repair that could be helpful?" And I think we're both bringing one to the table, so you go first. All right, so I've learned a lot from Beth Poland's research on, when I've come to think of as the five R's of an apology, which are regret, rationale, responsibility, repentance,

and repair. So regret is basically showing remorse, and that's the typical, I'm so sorry, that I made you feel this way, or I'm so sorry that happened. That turns out though, in the research, to be less important than some of the other components.

“I think the rationale is kind of table stakes to explain what you were thinking or why”

you made the mistake you did, but the part that I think most people overlook that really matters is responsibility, saying this is on me, either I caused the problem or I contributed to the problem or I don't even know what caused the problem, but I am taking responsibility for preventing it from happening again. And I think that goes to repentance, which is basically making a commitment to do better.

I love the saying, the best apology is change behavior. Yeah, me too. And you're almost there when you've expressed regret, you've given your rationale, and you've taken responsibility and repented, but ultimately repair is demonstrating that you mean it all by not committing another offense and failing to change your actions.

And to me, if you do those things, you've shown that you take really seriously the offense or the impact of your actions and you are sincere about your desire to make it right.

“And I think if I could pick to, I would say I want responsibility and repair.”

I want you to say, here's what I own that I did wrong or that I need to change, and then

I want you to prove it through following through and actually walking your talk. I agree on all counts, and I am bringing to the conversation Harriet Learner's work. Harriet Learner was a clinician at Minninger for many, many, many, many years. And she actually, finally enough, she wrote the first kind of self-reflections, psychology book I ever read called The Dance of Anger and my mom gave it to me as a cassette, a book

on tape. And I remember getting it in the mail and it's the dance of anger, and I was like, I don't know, and then my flight or did you read it? No. Did you listen to it yet?

No. And then now it's like, okay, I get it.

I did a two-part interview with her on unlockiness, and she has kind of nine essential

ingredients of a true apology. I want to go through them pretty quickly, but they're going to line up very much with the research you're talking about. One, I hate this part. It does not include the word but, get your butt out of the way.

That's a hard one for me sometimes, but it doesn't include the word but keeps a focus on your actions and not on the other person's response. Includes an offer of reparation or institution that fits the situation. It does not overdo, which I think is really interesting. Does not get caught up in who's more to blame or who started it requires that you do your

best to avoid a repeat of performance.

It should never serve to silence, which I think is really interesting if you've ever been

on the receiving of apology that was very much meant to just like, and that's the final word. We're done here. Yeah, we're done here. Right, it shouldn't be offered to make you feel better if it risks making the hurt

party feel worse. God, this is complicated and really good. And then nine does not ask the hurt party to do anything, not even to forgive. Yes, yes, what do you think? I mean, the the complementarity is great, but the one, well, two things, one, I think

the but is such an important qualifier and two, that last one, there is, there is a, there's

bothering me because I don't think you should be asking something of the person you're

trying to make a men's tape. I agree. You're putting the burden on them. I think it's up to you to earn their forgiveness, but you shouldn't be seeking it.

“You should try to make it right because it's the right thing to do.”

Okay, I got to you really funny story. You got to watch this shit with your own kids, let me tell you why. We were very conscious when Ellen and Charlie were little that they would apologize to one another. You know, we would apologize to them.

I did not grow up with parents who apologized. So we were very Steven, I were both very quick to apologize to our kids and one of the things

we taught our kids was to never say that's okay, but to say thank you and I never thought

much about it except like look at me, PBS and PR mom, you know, giving myself a fat on the back and you know, and then one day I really got frustrated with one of my kids and I knocked on the door and I was like, I came to apologize. I got scared and I can get scary when I'm scared and that's not okay. I apologize for how I showed up in that conversation.

It was not helpful and it did not honestly convey my excitement about you trying this new thing. And my kid looked right me, right if it looked right at me and said, thank you. I was like, what the shit, what are you, I was like, what the shit, I was so dumbfounded. I was like, wait, this is the part where you go, that's okay mom, I totally get it. You just, you know, you got some mama bear in you sometimes and you know, nothing.

Like a solemn, like this, this is what you do in the whole time. Okay. Thank you. I was like, you got grounded for our condolvalidation. No, no, no acceptance there whatsoever.

That's so funny. You know, we, we've had a similar conversation in our family and it's, what's hit me that

I never had thought about going in, which might be missing from both of our favorite

apology frameworks is I think when people, when people come in with that's okay. What the apologizer is really looking for is a, we're okay. Yeah. Yeah.

“And I think that distinction is so important.”

I want to, when, when I have wrong someone, including when I wronged you, Bernet, I, I don't want you to tell me that was okay. It wasn't okay. I'm not okay with the impact that I had, but I do want to know that we're okay. And that we can still respect each other and like each other despite the mistake that

I know. But you know what I do think that is, I do think that is asking the hurt party to, because I think there have been times where I have had an apology, I've given an apology to someone and I've literally asked or we okay and I've had that person say, not quite yet. So, and so I think that I am looking for a we're okay, but I don't get to take the timeline

for that. So, I just think the, I think the, I appreciate the apology. Thank you. I will tell you it's hard to hear. Like, I do think there's an, I don't know.

I really wanted to respond it with, well, you're grounded, you'll smile and ask, but, but I was actually so proud. It's like when your kids beat you at sports, you're either like I'm going to beat you. And I feel great or you just beat me and hey, I raised you either way, I'm awesome. So, great.

No. Yeah. It does, it does feel like a rejection a little bit though and I wonder if, I wonder if a modification of it is to say something to the effect of, I hope will be okay. Now I still think that's putting too much on someone and I actually don't think it's

a rejection. I actually think it is when, when, when they looked back at me and said thank you.

“I think it just left me sitting in my own accountability.”

And like, I think half my family are very, you know, half of us are very fast processors. Great. Let's go grab some Chinese food. And the other half are like, it's going to be a while before I'm okay. And, and that's my timeline of my call.

As it should be. Yeah. Oh, no. Okay. But great.

It was a great question. I read it once upon a dismal day Bob's ice cream lamp looked gloomy and gray.

That bad, maybe rampant up at hand.

I have an idea. Bob launched Canva and got into gear. Create the video in the Vampire team and make it the funnier, I mean, it went viral. Bob's business? I went viral.

Now, imagine what your dreams can become when you put imagination to work at Canva.com. Last question is from Cecil. And boy, this is going to put us right in an area where we, we see the world differently. Are you ready? I'm ready.

Okay. Back on LinkedIn, Cecil wrote, looking forward to the new podcast. How about this for a topic? This great leadership require the courage to remain uncertain and how do we show our uncertainty or hide it and it does it depend?

She writes and I love this because it's one of my favorite, it's one of my favorite quotes from a book. She said, "Here's the context for this," and Robert Harris's novel Conclave. The Dean of the College of Cardinals gives an opening sermon where he warned that certainty can be dangerous in matters of faith because it closes the mind.

I love this quote from Conclave.

I mean, I was so excited to see it on LinkedIn because I always think it's one of like

“a secret quotes that only I'm obsessed with, but I will only read the quote to you.”

My brothers and sisters in the course of a long life in the service of our mother the church, let me tell you that the one sin I have come to fear more than any other is certainty. certainty is the great enemy of unity, certainty is the deadly enemy of tolerance. It goes on with this, this line goes on to it concludes the quote. Our faith is a living thing precisely because it walks hand in hand with doubt.

If there was only certainty and there was no doubt, there would be no mystery and therefore no need for faith. I love Cecil's question about whether the ability to be in uncertainty is a strength or deficit for a leader. I actually love the mysteries of faith, but I am not sure and I want to ask you this as the

org psychologist that you are. I'm not sure that we're neurobiologically hardwired for the amount of uncertainty we're facing right now. I want all your thoughts. I want your thoughts.

It's such a great topic. I know. I want your thoughts on faith is only faith when it walks hand in hand with doubt. I want your thoughts on our hardwiring for certainty. I'm not qualified to weigh in on the first one because I don't know anything about faith.

Will you raise, will you raise a agnostic or atheist or just not, religion was not a big part? Yeah, I just don't remember thinking much about it, talking much about it.

“I think the second part though, I have a fair amount, I have a reasonable amount of knowledge”

on, but you can calibrate me. I'm not convinced. Sorry, I lost out through a batch of the last episode on that a cognition or calibrated each other. I like it go.

To bring it on, you always calibrate me.

I think that's one of the most fun things about learning from you. Same. You are not shy about saying, nope, nope, I don't think you got that right. No, neither are you, and it would be so boring if we were. True.

So I think we are absolutely hardwired for the level of uncertainty we're experiencing. I actually think we're hardwired for much more uncertainty than we're experiencing. I mean, can you imagine, if you think about where our hardwiring comes from, right, in our evolutionary history, imagine not knowing at any moment in daily life, if there was going to be a creature emerging from the jungle that would attack you, not knowing

if all the sudden the heavens would send a tsunami or an earthquake to destroy your entire life.

“I think not only were there threats that we just had no tools and systems to deal with,”

but we didn't even understand what was causing them. I think about all the diseases that people just died of, and they didn't know that germs were a thing. They didn't know that you needed to avoid eating certain plants, right? Like, there was tremendous uncertainty in daily life, and you could just be fine one moment

and die the next moment and have no idea what the cause was going to be. And I think we live in a much more certain, much more predictable world now than the world we were hardwired in, and so I would diagnose the problem differently. Okay. But let me pause there.

I'm really curious to hear you're here. Now keep going. I don't, I'm, I'm, I'm absorbing.

is not the wiring, but rather the practice in dealing with uncertainty, precisely because we have built a world that shields us from it, that any time there is a problem we know where to turn.

“I think it's why so many people struggle with COVID is, all of a sudden, you weren't sure”

if you could trust your doctor, maybe for the first time in your life, or maybe when

you've dealt with that in the past, you at least knew where to go for a second opinion, and you knew what specialists to see. And now you weren't even sure if those people were accurate. And I think that what we're facing now is attention between our hard wiring, which is very much primed to respond to threats and our experience, which doesn't necessarily equip

us to deal with the kinds of threats and the sources of uncertainty that we're now facing, which would include AI, climate change, political instability and turbulence, and what have I forgotten. I'm really taking this in, okay, yeah, I have a leg. Pause cast, here it is.

Yeah, the pause cast, okay, so I want to walk through what you're thinking is, it's really interesting to me.

Can we agree, can we go to some underlying assumptions and start to see where things

take different paths?

“Because I'm not as, I'm, I'm, I think there's a lot of merit in what you're saying, actually.”

And for some reason, it doesn't feel as opposed to, I want to understand where the differences and where the similarities lie. So can we agree that the brains are wired to treat uncertainty as a threat and that ambiguity activates the same neural stress responses danger as physical danger, that ambiguity and physical danger are very similar in terms of our threat response to it.

Yes, with the caveat that they're pretty strong individual differences. So if we allow for the fact that there's a personality trait or two, that will lead to some people to not treat uncertainty as a threat, yeah, I think on average, yes. Okay.

So let's talk about intolerance of uncertainty.

Are you familiar with that field? Okay. Oh boy, did you all see that? Look, I hope y'all caught that look. Aaron, I want you to do a double zoom in on that look, that's that.

That is the, no, no, no, that is the frickin' Adam Grant, oh, yeah, let's go. You want a dance, you want to talk intolerance of uncertainty, you want to talk, you know, rubber show, like, let's go, okay, I know that look, I love this look, okay. So let's just walk people through it. So intolerance of uncertainty, a measurable cognitive vulnerability, not a personality

weakness, right, that there is an intolerance for uncertainty and that it drives a lot of the anxiety spectrum, right, weigh in, go ahead. Yes, and it's, it's so pervasive that for people who have a strong intolerance for uncertainty, they would actually rather hear bad news or criticism than just not know. Like, certain negative information is more reassuring to them than uncertain, possibly positive

information, which tells me this goes really deep. Who would rather be told they sucked than just not get feedback, somebody who does not like uncertainty? Hey, I'd rather have bad news, I'd rather have bad news and no news. I mean, that's like that's the whole thing.

I mean, I, I just did, we did a fun kind of launch for my Asian course, new book. And she was referencing some uncertainty research about where they're, you probably know this research. I don't know it that well, but I relate to it where you added choice of, there's a 50, 50% chance you'd get a shock or a 100% chance that you'd get a shock.

The majority of people chose the 100% chance. The hundred. Of course. Me too. 50, 50.

Yes, it was, but what would you pick?

“I think it depends on how severe the shock is.”

Okay, let's just say it's tolerable, but it's not just bad. You go for the 50, 50. I'll say it's, and it's, and it's uncontrollable, but tolerable. I mean, you're not going to get any other shit through your human subject, so let's say. I think old me would have chosen the hundred, and I hope new me would choose the 50, 50.

So you have some empathy for people that'd rather have bad news. Oh, yeah. I think I, I might, I mean, I might still be one of them. I might be one of them for a lot of my life, for sure, you. I don't think I think when you get to my age, you've lived through enough bad news

that you'll roll the dice with the 50, 50.

but it's not as tough as, you know, you're not going to be put out of your misery with a really terrible call at nine o'clock on Monday.

That's always going to be worse than a five o'clock at Tuesday call.

That was good news.

“You know, I mean, so I think I have aged into some tolerance, but not from like becoming smarter,”

just having lived through some more bad news. You are tracking with the life span development trends, where as people move from their 20s toward their 50s and 60s. They do tend to be a little more comfortable with uncertainty and ambiguity over time. And I think you're right, there's something to the life experience there.

I also want to know, can we accelerate that? Can we help people become more comfortable with uncertainty when they are in their 20s? Okay. So given that we come from, given that we understand, we do believe that our brains are wired to perceive uncertainty as a threat, and barring some personality differences, we

can experience the same kind of neural stress response to physical danger as we do to ambiguity or not knowing. I'm trying to make sense of the comparison from a biological evolutionary perspective that you're saying to today. And I'll tell you why, is there any cultural relevance back then, like you knew 50% of

your family is going to be dinner for something, and today we're sold a bill of goods that human life should be happy in certain, and is that part of capitalism and marketing, and so are there other cultural forces that play today that make uncertainty, wait, let me think about this, are there cultural forces today that make uncertainty more difficult because certainty is positioned as an acquirable privilege, that if you're wealthy enough,

smart enough, white enough, straight enough, male enough, like you can privilege your way that is possible to be a human and privilege your way into a certain life. It's a big question. Yeah, it is.

“It's interesting, I was going somewhere similar, which is I think that in the past, if we”

rewind a lot of industrial revolution progress and understanding in the world, I think that uncertainty was expected and accepted. And now there's an increasingly common assumption that I will not have to deal with unpredictability in my life, and when that assumption is violated, it's very uncomfortable, I see this all is time with our students who, if you talk about the bill they were sold, the bill they

were sold is like every generation before you, you're going to be better off than your parents were. Yeah. And all of a sudden, confronting the uncertainty of, I don't know if I'm going to find a job, when I was supposed to have a better job than my parents got, what is that?

That's not right. That's not fair. How am I supposed to thrive and survive in that world? And I think that that is hugely threatening against the backdrop of those expectations that it was going to be predictable, and let me say another word that I think is core to

what the problem is, which is controllable.

Yes, controllable. I don't actually think that what people are looking for is certainty or predictability. I think what they're looking for is control. And uncertainty threatens their ability to feel like they are in charge of their destiny. God, it's like, I'm just, I don't know why the first thing that pops up for me, it's

“going to be random, and you have to promise me if I say it out loud, we're not going”

to go on our web at trail. But the first thing that comes up for me, when you say, when you're talking about the relationship between certainty and uncertainty and control, is how, how and mesh the relationship is between addiction and shame that researchers really have a hard time temporarily understanding which comes first.

But I feel like that, I just have that same feeling when you talk about control and uncertainty.

Like it's just, it's like, are they, are they the same things and which came first and what

do we need more of? It's, it's almost so inextricably connected. And I don't want to lose the point either that, but say, no, no, good.

that I think about all the time, which is world building, you know, so when you're

going to tell a story, especially a fiction story, you build the world first, so if you're

going to tell the story of Lord of the Rings, you know, you've got the hero's journey, but first you build the world, so everyone understands the world in which the protagonist is acting, and, and, you know, I think part of, part of today, the world building, is if you do everything right, you can have less uncertainty and more control, and it plays into, it plays into everything, I mean, the way everything is marketed, advertising, it

plays into politics, which I want to get into, but the world building today leverages that the human brain and our threats and our fears around control and uncertainty, do you agree? Yeah, I do, and I think, I think the, the thing that jumped out at me about control being

“a really important piece of this puzzle is, I think about the classic glass and singer”

experiments with, with stress where people are blasted with these uncomfortably loud bursts of noise, and you, this is exactly in the range that you were describing earlier of, it's tolerable, but it is definitely not pleasant, and in, in one version of these experiments, people are given a button they could press, and they find the blast of noise less unpleasant,

even though they never pressed the button, because they knew they could control, oh my

God, those people, those people are Texans, that's a Texas woman, that's those are Texas women, and I'm going to tell you, those are Texas women, I'm going to tell you why, this is why I hold my purse while I'm on the side of the stage before they call my name out to talk to 8,000 people, I need to have my pocket book and an exit strategy if you want me to do something at all times, I'm not, I've never run, but I need my pocket book or

my purse, whatever you'll call, but purse, and I need an exit strategy, and I won't use

“it, but if you don't give it to me, fuck you, I'm leaving, and that's, I think you reacting”

not just to the uncertainty, but to the threat to control, I mean, have you checked out Texas men recently? Yeah, like, I mean, yeah, there are, there are some good ones, but there are some not great ones, so yeah, it's like, okay, so they do better if they have an off ramp. Yeah, even if they don't use it, just knowing I could press the button to shield myself from the noise is enough to help me cope with the, that's, that's not good, but

also the, the uncertainty of, but I don't know when it's going to come, and I don't know exactly how loud it's going to be, and maybe, you know, I think you're right, it may be that the desire for control leads us to dislike uncertainty, it may be that the, the, the desire for some degree

of certainty leads us to dislike a lack of control, having control might be the most important

“antidote that we have to the sense of uncertainty that people are struggling with.”

Yes, I mean, just give me my pocket book and a protein bar and a diet coke. I will, I'll be up for anything, but I'm, I'm going to have my own money, I'm going to have my own protein bar, and I'm going to have my own diet coke, and then we'll see how it goes, but at any point, I can tuck and roll and go, like that, that is just, I mean, why are you laughing? Don't roll, don't roll if the diet coke is open. No, I will always save the diet coke. So, okay, so let me

this is so interesting. I want to read this research to you. This is from Hofstead's cultural dimensions on uncertainty avoidance, which I love across cultural studies, yes, yes, yes, yes, you are, you are looking like you are gunning for a conversation, I like it. I mean, I'm in your territory here, I love it. So, the principle is that, and this is true across cultures, many cultures. His research, Hofstead's research found that entire societies are organized around managing uncertainty

through religion, law, and technology. Okay, I'm going to go on now, and I'm going to move, I'm going to move from Hofstead into a compensatory control theory, which I love, which is because the Gregor. Yes, because this is a part of terror management theory. So, okay, so let me just back it up. So, let me just, we'll, we'll, we'll have an, in order to not like nerd out on y'all, like, what just happened? Example one day, Adam Grant. You're just, you're just citing, like,

you went right from, like, you went right from organizational behavior to psychology, and it's like, you're, you're in the center of my, in your universe. Okay, welcome to my playground.

we're going to put all the references in the notes, the show notes, our team member Paul is

“amazing at doing that. So he will look you up if you want to nerd out. Okay, so Hofstead's research”

says that entire societies organized around managing uncertainty through religion, law and technology. When uncertainty spikes, this is now going into control, kind of compensatory control theory, when uncertainty spikes, economic threat, loss of control, humiliation, mortality reminders, mortality reminders happening everywhere right now. This, the psychological demand for certainty does not just increase. It accelerates. And this is huge. This is, is it jost?

I always pronounce this researcher's name's jost. Yes, jost. This is universal, no ideology,

education level or income bracket is immune. So we try to create certainty in societies with religion, law and technology. When uncertainty spikes, the demand for certainty then just go up, it accelerates. And this is universal across ideologies, education levels and income brackets. What cluster fuckery does this set us up for politically? I mean, this is, this is the world we're

“seeing right now. What we're, I think it explains a lot of the polarization and extremism that we've”

been tracking across countries, which is in response to increasing levels of uncertainty. One, you get what McGregor called defensive zeal, which is this kind of, it's a compensatory conviction response where, okay, the, the world is unstable and I'm not sure what's going to happen. So I am going to cling to an ideology. I'm going to cling to a political tribe that gives me a sense of coherence and order. Like a bully in an ocean. And yeah, yeah, that's a,

I think that's a great metaphor for it. And I won't let it go because it is my survival raft. I mean, the other thing it gives us is something we didn't touch on in our conversation about

Narphus narcissistic leadership in our third episode, which is, this is under uncertainty. That's

when people gravitate toward authoritarian to narcissists who pedal certainty, who promise that they have all the answers, who are basically, they're, their charlatans and snake oil sales people. And yet, they are more appealing to people. This is some brand new resources come out in the last year or so. That leadership, authoritarian leadership, leadership that's high certainty, is more appealing to people who have low self esteem, who are searching for somebody that will make

them feel like, yeah, I can handle the challenges. We are in good hands. And it's almost like it's they're, they're getting, they're getting lulled into a false sense of security and safety by people who are overconfident and persuading them that, like, yeah, yeah, I will take care of everything. As opposed to just accepting, the world is complex. It's messy. We're not sure exactly what's going to happen. Oh, my God. Yeah. Sound familiar. Yes. No, I'm, I'm thinking about the research

term mortality salience. Do you know this work? Terror management theory, Greenberg and Solomon, and and presents. Yeah, some presents get, you are so scary when it comes to these things. Like, where were you when I was getting my PhD? I would have been like, let me just pontificate here. And if you could just attach every idea to some peer reviewed. Okay. So this is terror management

“that I think is interesting. When reminded of death or existential threat, people cling harder”

to leaders who promise protection and meeting and meaning. May read again. This is terror management theory. When reminded of death or existential threat, people cling harder to leaders who promise protection and meaning. This is mortality salience. Oh, my God. Listen, I mean, I mean, got it. This is happening. This is happening. I mean, this is like a lot of people clinging to their buoy in the shit soup. Amanda Brown, 2026. Oh, okay. Let's just do this.

Yeah, I do. God. I do, I do, I do want to caveat that some of the terror management findings have failed to replicate the last few years. Well, there have been, I mean, obviously social psychology

that, you know, didn't have big enough sample sizes or, you know, in some cases where, you know,

we're not well-designed have not stood up to scrutiny when, you know, replicated many, many times

“with larger pools of participants. But I think that, you know, this, this particular effect”

seems to be robust that when people are facing a threat, whether it's to their lives or their livelihoods, they will gravitate toward people who offer them a false sense of certainty and security. And I think that is, you know, it's dangerous in terms of who we let run our workplaces. It's dangerous in terms of who we let run our countries. And it's something that we don't have great societal solutions to. It's like, well, lower the threat level. Good luck with that one.

Like, how are we, how are we going to solve that? And yeah, at a country or a societal scale. So, Renee, I want to ask you, is a social worker? Like, how do you think about what we can do in, you know, in our own lives and in the local systems that we actually do have influence over with our teams, with our families, to manage the uncertainty level so that it doesn't become

“an overwhelming threat? So, I think the two things that come up for me that are both kind of”

research-based right off the bat is critical thinking education and everything that this

administration has banned. Critical theory, critical thinking, I think that there is, there are a lot, I think there's evidence that to be able to think critically and through a system's theory lens. Like, we used to teach our students follow the money. You know, just, you know, it's, it's, it's, I think, some critical thinking. I think intellectual humility. I also think building connection and community. So, I think when community connection and community

trust is high, I think we're less our susceptibility is lower when we have levels of community trust. This is an idea that I did, I had never heard of and I'm so interesting. I really hope you know it.

Do you know a population and pre-bunking?

As a, as a way to fight disinformation? Yes. Yes. I'm thinking of, uh, Sander Vunder Linden, for example. Yes. Yes. I don't know how you do that. It's wild to me. So, learning to recognize manipulation techniques, not just specific false claims,

“before you're exposed to them. So, I think the studies that I came across and read and I'm”

going to fully just say I just read abstracts and then next, I read the top in the bottom, which I know is dangerous in itself. But this idea that not to teach people the content of what false ideas are, but to help to teach pre-bunking by teaching them most common ways misinformation is distributed. What do you know about it? Tell us about it, because it's like I want my kids to have this. I want this. Yeah. I mean, some of this is basic media literacy training, right? To interrogate sources

as opposed to just accepting them, to have standards of evidence and say, okay, let me, let me see. Is this claim backed by, uh, you know, a randomized controlled trial or by a longitudinal study? If not, it might just be someone's opinion. I think that we spend so much time putting out little fires as opposed to zooming out and asking, like, what is causing the forest fire? The problem that we need to solve is not, like, there's a specific piece of misinformation

that people are buying into. It's that people lack the tools to evaluate information accurately. Yeah. And also, sometimes they lack the motivation to evaluate it accurately. There was some research that J. Van Bavel turned me on to showing that you could get people to be less likely to spread fake news, demonstrably false information on social media just by prompting them to consider is this true? And that people weren't, like, by default, they weren't thinking about, like,

is this accurate? They think they were thinking about, could this be true? Or is this interesting? Is this going to get me likes and shares? And so they just kind of instinctively posted it or reposted it and just getting them to pause and reflect. And ask the question, is this true? Was enough to reduce the rate of spreading bad information? And so I think that this is partially a skill problem. It's partially a motivation problem.

Yeah. I mean, the algorithms are not dealt reward truth and complexity. The algorithms reward misinformation, vitriol. Yeah. I mean, it's just, I think it's, I think it's, and I will say that, like, AI and unskilled users of AI, AI can be so psychophantic that you can really go in.

lit review with human researchers and a parallel team that was using just AI for the lit review.

And 60 to 70 percent of the sources, including a source that said had brown and grant.

As an MIT Sloan was completely a hallucination. And AI gave the same weight to a real peer-reviewed

“academic article as it did, you know, read it user. I got a new boat. And so I think this is an”

interesting conversation. We're the end of time. I do want to think the people who are writing in questions and comments. And, you know, taking the time, just to say, to get feedback on the podcast, which we're, we love and we're open to. And also, you know, writing things like, hey,

I want you to go deeper here, or I disagree with this. Can y'all revisit it and think about

this perspective? I'm so grateful for that. I love, I miss community of discourse and debate and ideas, because it's not just harder to find these days. So I'm grateful for that. What are you grateful for today? Oh, well, I don't want to be redundant, but I'm actually grateful to have an audience of people with us and a partner in what's the opposite of crime. I'm attempting to offer something useful to the world. Yeah. A partner in detective work, whatever it is, who don't take uncertainty

“as a threat, but take it as an occasion for curiosity. And I think that, you know, that's part”

of what this show is about. I think that it's so easy to cling to the comfort of certainty. And ignore the discomfort of doubt. But I think doubt is where the learning happens. And it's it's off in the engine of curiosity. Yeah, a hundred percent of it. I promise it, and I know that you're not a faith person, but can I just share one quote before we go by one of my faith, my faith mentors, father Richard Rohr. I thought, it just reminded me of us a little bit. He writes,

this is Richard Rohr's writing, "My scientists, friends, have come up with things like principles of uncertainty and dark holes. They're willing to live inside imagined hypotheses and theories,

but many religious folks insist on answers that are always true. We love closure, resolution,

and clarity while thinking that we are the people of faith. How strange that the very word faith has come to me, it's opposite." It's interesting. Wow. We can agree on that, I think. I did not expect to get my now new favorite take on scientific thinking and uncertainty from a religious figure. Yeah. Well played. Richard Rohr. All right, I'll see you next time. With it doesn't different apps that don't talk to each other. Introducing Odo,

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