Go4yourGrowth · Angela Baucke
Go4yourGrowth · Angela Baucke
A guide for anyone without a clear answer right now
Maybe you're facing a decision right now that no one can tell you the outcome of. Or you're leading a team that's asking for direction you don't have yourself. Both are more the rule than the exception these days. I came across journalist Simone Stolzoff and his book "How to Not Know" through McKinsey's annual book recommendations – and because the question of how we handle uncertainty and crises has occupied me for a long time anyway, it grabbed me immediately. His core question is simple but not trivial: not whether we have to live with uncertainty – we do, regardless – but how we do it without constantly working against ourselves.
How serious things currently are shows up in an economic indicator that economists have tracked since 1900: the US Economic Policy Uncertainty Index hit its highest level ever recorded in April 2025, at 715.59 points. An economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago put it this way: "The level of uncertainty in this index is higher than it was even during the Great Depression, the financial crisis, or during Covid." At Glassdoor, where millions of employees rate their employers, the number of reviews mentioning the word "uncertainty" rose 80 percent year-over-year in April 2025.
An experiment by researchers at University College London makes the point well: one group of participants was told, in a computer game, that they would receive a mild but unpleasant electric shock with certainty. Another group was only told the probability was 50 percent. Measured by sweat production and pupil dilation, it was the second group that showed the most stress – more than the group that knew for certain the shock was coming. Apparently our nervous system tolerates a certain, unpleasant piece of news more easily than pure not-knowing.
This translates directly to everyday life: a team left hanging in uncertainty for a long time usually suffers more than one that received a clear, if unwelcome, message. And someone who keeps putting off a difficult decision while waiting for more clarity often pays a higher price than someone who decides with incomplete information and moves on.
Stolzoff describes three patterns that make life harder for us, precisely because they feel safe in the moment.
The first is clinging to the familiar – "that's how we've always done it," even when it no longer fits. The cost doesn't show up right away; it shows up in everything you never discover because you didn't let go.
The second is false certainty. In 2016, the man who would later become a Nobel laureate and the "Godfather of AI," Geoffrey Hinton, said in a talk at the Creative Destruction Lab in Toronto what has since become a famous line: "People should stop training radiologists now. It's just completely obvious that deep learning is going to outperform radiologists within five years." He compared radiologists to "the coyote that's already run off the edge of the cliff but hasn't looked down yet." Nine years later, the New York Times reported in May 2025, the opposite has happened at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota: the number of radiologists employed there has grown by 55 percent since 2016, to more than 400. Selling a forecast with great conviction looks confident in the moment – but the bill comes due once reality goes the other way.
The third is reaching for control where none is actually possible. The antidote to that isn't more control, but adaptability. A well-known example, which Stolzoff tells himself: Stuart Butterfield shut down his successful gaming startup Tiny Speck, even with millions still in the bank, because he trusted his own doubt more than the outward success. The internal communication tool his team had built along the way became Slack.
Before we get to the practical approaches, one objection matters to me. Lines like "just be more open to the unknown" sound well-meaning, but they often miss the mark. Butterfield jumped with millions behind him. Most people jump without that safety net – and for them, an uncertain decision isn't an adventure, it's a real risk. Behavioral economists Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir showed in their book "Scarcity" that financial hardship measurably narrows a person's cognitive capacity – their ability to plan, concentrate, and control impulses. Someone who's short on money often simply lacks the mental bandwidth it takes to sit calmly with uncertainty. That's not a character flaw; it's a well-documented psychological effect.
There's a second, quieter form of unfavorable starting conditions: some people grew up with parents who, because of their own hard experiences – war, loss, hardship – could no longer believe that life had anything good to offer, and who, out of worry, constrained rather than encouraged. Someone who breaks out of such a pattern doesn't thereby prove that starting conditions don't matter. It shows something else instead: breaking out rarely happens through sheer willpower alone – usually it happens because somewhere, a crack appears in the old story: a different relationship, a role model, a chance encounter.
And a third warning: be wary of advice that breaks complex, hard-won abilities down into "seven steps anyone can take." Resilience depends heavily on things you can't simply train into yourself – reliable people around you, a certain degree of security, a childhood that didn't constantly unsettle you. The approaches below are meant as an offer you can test for yourself, not a formula that works the same way for everyone.
With that caveat in mind, here are the approaches that hold up best in both practice and research.
Look back instead of only worrying ahead. Think of three situations where you've already made it through an uncertain period. This isn't an empty motivational exercise: psychologist Albert Bandura showed as early as 1977 that confidence in your own ability to act comes above all from concrete, firsthand successes like these – not from encouragement from the outside.
Name your own anchors. These are values, people, or commitments that stay in place no matter what's shifting around you. When Airbnb lost 80 percent of its business at the start of the pandemic, founder Brian Chesky wrote down six simple guiding principles for himself – things like "be decisive" or "win the next season." His point: in a crisis, you're better off making decisions based on principles than on assumed outcomes, because principles still hold even when the situation changes.
Act instead of just ruminating. Small, low-stakes steps into the unknown train your capacity to tolerate uncertainty more effectively than any amount of thinking about it. A crisis manager Stolzoff profiles, after a serious factory accident, simply rolled out a huge sheet of butcher paper across the conference table and listed every open task with the leadership team, one by one. Diffuse overwhelm turned into concrete, checkable steps.
Nurture relationships that hold you up. This is probably the best-supported point of all. A network analysis of 1,121 adults found that people with secure attachment experience uncertainty as threatening noticeably less often, because their sense of trust and security is directly tied to less mistrust and less social anxiety. That holds for close friendships just as much as for a team you can rely on.
Be gentle with yourself. A survey of 667 adults during the pandemic found that people who don't immediately judge themselves for not having an answer tend to tolerate uncertainty better, and stay healthier, than those who punish themselves for not knowing. The study shows a clear statistical association, not experimental proof – but it lines up with several independent studies reaching the same conclusion.
Find a "why" bigger than the outcome. Knowing what something is for makes the path there easier to bear, even when the path itself stays uncertain – an idea that traces back to psychiatrist and concentration camp survivor Viktor Frankl.
And something easily overlooked: the body. Sleep, movement, and conscious breathing simply increase your capacity to tolerate uncertainty before any mental stance even comes into play. Small, steady daily rituals work similarly – they offer something to hold on to exactly when the bigger picture is in motion.
An image Stolzoff brought back from his time at the design agency IDEO captures this well: you're sitting in a rowboat on a lake completely covered in fog. You can't see far ahead, and you don't know exactly where you'll land. Your job comes down to two things: trusting that you'll eventually reach shore, and continuing to row.
Every decision closes off other paths at the same time, and that loss usually registers immediately, while the gain from the path you chose only reveals itself over time. Stolzoff tells an image from author Cheryl Strayed to capture this: with every decision you make, you board a ship, while an entire fleet of other ships sets sail at the same moment – all the paths you didn't take. Her advice: wave at the ghost ships and keep sailing, instead of standing on the shore watching them go.
The real task – whether as a leader, in your own life, or for anyone facing an important decision right now – is rarely to simply become braver. It's more about asking yourself honestly which of the anchors above already exist in your life, which are missing – and then following the principle of small steps: not the one big leap, but a single, manageable step into the unknown this week.
That can start very small, even with routines that have nothing to do with the actual decision: brushing your teeth with your non-dominant hand, starting the morning with a glass of lukewarm water instead of your usual coffee, deliberately taking a familiar route differently. Small disruptions like these don't change the actual uncertainty you're wrestling with – but they train exactly the muscle that matters: teaching your nervous system that "different from usual" isn't automatically dangerous. Practicing this on a small scale makes the bigger leap easier, without waiting for the one big, certain answer that was never going to come anyway.