Clarity vs. Certainty

In a highly uncertain world, it will be very easy for leaders to confuse clarity with certainty. Many people—including many leaders—just aren’t prepared for the speed and scale of disruption they will be facing over the next decade. In this future world, simple will be good, but simplistic will be dangerous.

Simplistic solutions will become more alluring as the degree of uncertainty rises. An urgent need for what psychologists call cognitive closure can lure anyone into simplistic logic that confuses clarity and certainty. Everything in the VUCA world will be risky, but clarity will offer lower risk, whereas certainty will create higher risk.

What is the difference between clarity and certainty? Clarity is usually expressed in stories, while certainty is usually expressed in rules. Rigid rules can get leaders in a lot of trouble in the VUCA world, while stories encourage people to engage. Clarity is lucid and coherent; certainty is definite and brittle. Great stories invite people to add color within the boundaries of the story. Rules punish people who violate them. Stories sing. Rules shout.

Neuroscience has a big cautionary lesson for know-it-all leaders: beware when you are certain about anything. Neuroscientists have a term for certainty: knowing we know. If you ever know you know something, be careful. If a leader speaks with absolute certainty about anything but core value commitments, beware. If you encounter a person who uses the word “absolutely” a lot, beware.

Neuroscientist Robert Burton’s On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You Are Not, explores why people in controlled laboratory experiments continue to believe they are right, even if it is demonstrated to them that they are actually wrong. He has put people in experimental settings using fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) where they can see they are wrong, but their brains keep telling them that they are right. Dr. Burton explains this counter-intuitive phenomenon in this way:

Despite how certainty feels, it is neither a conscious choice nor even a thought process. Certainty and similar states of “knowing we know” arise out of involuntary brain mechanisms that, like love or anger, function independently of reason. (Burton 2010)

What this means for leaders is that if you feel certain you are reaching a rational conclusion, your feelings may not be accurately reflecting the reality of the situation at all. What looks and feels to you for all the world like a sure thing may be anything but.

I had a very disturbing personal experience of this phenomenon. When I was the president of Institute for the Future, the hiring decision that I made that I was most certain about, the one that I had complete confidence in, was the worst hiring decision I ever made. I knew that I knew so strongly that I didn’t listen to the people close to me who questioned me.

What do you do as a leader to hedge against such a mistake? There is something really obvious you can do: give a trusted person who is close to you permission to question and challenge you. You need somebody whose opinion you value to be able to tell you you’re wrong.

As I was finishing writing this book, a New Yorker article by Elizabeth Kolbert came out summarizing three new books that reach conclusions similar to those of Robert Burton. But these books come from the perspective of the cognitive sciences rather than neuroscience. Called “Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds,” this article starts from the common concept of confirmation bias (it is easier to believe things that are consistent with our previously held beliefs), which is now being reframed as “myside bias.” New research shows that “people believe that they know way more than they actually do. What allows us to persist in this belief is other people” (Kolbert 2017).

FIGURE 8 A summary of looking backward from the future

Knowing you know will be very dangerous. Leaders will have to develop their clarity but moderate their certainty. This will be very difficult in a highly disruptive world where people long for certainty. Seek out clarity in leaders, but beware of certainty.

Looking backward from the future will become much more important for leaders. The next generation of leaders is likely to find looking long easier than older leaders. Young people who became adults in 2010 or later are likely to have a competitive advantage over the rest of us.