The Decisiveness Crisis: Why Senior Leadership Teams Are Most Likely to Get Uncertainty Wrong
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Here's a question Sam Conniff asks in every leadership session he runs:
In a moment of profound uncertainty, would you prefer to be seen as decisive, even if you knew that would lead to a negative outcome? Or could you tolerate being seen as indecisive, if in time a positive outcome would emerge?
The answer, rationally, is obvious. And yet across more than seven thousand leaders, four years of data, and every industry and geography Sam's team has tested: two thirds choose the negative outcome. They choose to look decisive, even knowing it leads somewhere worse.
Sam calls this the decisiveness crisis. On this episode of the Creative Confidence Podcast, he joined Mina Seetharaman to unpack what's driving it, why senior leadership teams may be the most vulnerable layer in most organizations, and why the solution is more learnable than you might expect.
Sam Conniff is the founder of Uncertainty Experts and the author of The Uncertainty Toolkit: How to Feel Calmer, Happier, and More Confident in an Uncertain World. His research program, built with neuroscientist and partner Catherine Templar Lewis, draws on more than 20,000 participants over six years to create the largest workplace study on uncertainty and decisiveness in the world.
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Article Summary
Why uncertainty registers in the body, not just the brain
The cognitive response to uncertainty: Fear, fog, and stasis
What the decisiveness question and the data reveals
Why senior leadership teams are most vulnerable to false certainty
Altitude, horizon, and agency: making uncertainty more manageable
Why uncertainty registers in the body, not just the brain
Uncertainty doesn't just challenge our thinking. According to Sam's research, it registers in the nervous system as a physical threat. And that changes everything about how we respond to it.
"The feeling of uncertainty takes our prefrontal cortex and our cognitive and analytical abilities offline," Sam explains. "It feels like a panic. And that's when we reach for safety behaviors because they quell the emotional side of it."
The top five uncertainty safety behaviors at work: calling meetings, false busyness, seeking others' advice, scheduling strategy reviews, and CC'ing more people on emails. None of these move the situation forward. They just make the discomfort more manageable in the moment.
This isn't a failure of leadership. It's a human nervous system doing exactly what it was built to do. But naming it for what it is—a safety behavior—allows you to start redesigning your reaction.
The cognitive response to uncertainty: Fear, fog, and stasis
Early in their research, Sam and Catherine asked thousands of participants two questions: What do you think about uncertainty? And then: How does uncertainty make you feel?
The gap between those two answers is where their framework lives. Cognitive responses to uncertainty were broadly balanced—roughly a third positive, a third negative, a third mixed. Felt responses were 80 percent negative.
From thousands of responses, three patterns emerged.
Fear is the most common: anxiety, sleeplessness, dread. The emotion itself isn't the problem, Sam says. The problem is the workplace culture that makes it so hard to acknowledge.
Fog is the second: confusion, mental circularity, frustration. When the brain expects something to happen and it doesn't, the result is dissonance. Repeated often enough, people start making fewer predictions and shutting down to protect themselves from that feeling.
Stasis is the furthest end: feeling stuck, lost, disconnected from purpose. It may feel like a quiet erosion of conviction or confidence.
The counterintuitive part: the people experiencing all three are the least likely to be able to ask for help. They're anxious, not thinking clearly, and feel stuck all at once.
What the decisiveness question and the data reveals
Let’s revisit the binary question Sam poses in every leadership session:
In a moment of profound uncertainty, would you prefer to be seen as decisive, even if you knew that would lead to a negative outcome? Or could you tolerate being seen as indecisive, if in time a positive outcome would emerge?
It was written with researchers at University College London's Centre for the Study of Decision-Making Uncertainty, established in the wake of the 2008 financial collapse specifically to study how organizations make decisions in the unknown.
There should be no real choice. Every rational actor would choose the positive outcome. And yet two thirds don't.
"If you're really decisive," Sam notes, "you haven't even listened to the end of the question. It's not about the outcome. It's about being decisive."
The finding reveals an underlying cultural problem. Most organizations have spent decades rewarding the appearance of certainty and penalizing visible uncertainty. Leaders have been trained by MBAs, performance reviews, and boards to project confidence above all else. The result is a system optimized for looking right, even at the cost of being right.
Why senior leadership teams are most vulnerable to false certainty
When Sam's team broke the data down by hierarchy, one finding stood out above everything else: senior leadership teams were most likely to choose the negative outcome.
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C-suite executives chose the negative outcome around 52% of the time.
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Individual contributors chose the negative outcome around 55% of the time.
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For senior leaders under three years in their role, that number climbs above 80%.
Sam offers the finding with care: "This is said with absolute compassion for a vulnerable layer in most businesses."
The picture he paints is specific. A leader in their 40s, two decades working toward a role that has fundamentally shifted in the last three years. The technology they're expected to master didn't exist when they grew up. Their compensation hasn't kept pace. Their children are becoming teenagers. And they are in control of the budget, expected to show up in all-hands meetings with answers.
"Does not saying 'I don't know' feel safe?" Sam asks. "Does your team want to hear it? Do your investors? Your board?"
In the episode, Sam goes deeper into how the numbers shift by sector and tenure and shares what he found when he put leaders' assumptions about their teams' biggest uncertainties next to what those teams actually reported. The gap is striking.
Altitude, horizon, and agency: making uncertainty more manageable
The goal isn't leaders who say "I don't know" and stop there. Sam's framework is about knowing when and how to hold uncertainty and when to choose decisiveness.
He calls this being uncertainty-ready. And it comes down to three questions.
Altitude: Are you seeing this uncertainty through the lens of your own experience and biases, or can you get higher? The simplest version: identify three diverse data points—a piece of advice, a data set, an outside perspective—before you decide.
Horizon: What's the real decision window, not the one your nervous system invented? "If you set yourself a deadline," Sam says, "the feeling of pressure goes away." Instead of making a decision in the moment, tell your team when you’ll make the decision. That deadline is a decisive act, and it creates space for new information to emerge.
Agency: Instead of defaulting to what could go wrong, ask: what's the best possible outcome if I get this right? "Just those three questions transform the pressure," Sam says. "You've created a scaffolding around a better decision amidst profound uncertainty."
Put it into practice
Ask the decisiveness question with your team. Pose Sam's binary anonymously to open an honest conversation about what's actually driving decisions under pressure.
Name the safety behavior. Next time you feel the pull to call a meeting or CC three more people, pause. Is this moving the situation forward, or just making you feel better about it?
Identify where you are: fear, fog, or stasis. Naming which state you're in is the first step toward getting out of it.
Use altitude, horizon, and agency on your next hard decision. What are three diverse data points you can gather? What's the real deadline? What's the best possible outcome if you approach this well?
Explore More
Listen to more episodes
This conversation is part of an ongoing series on uncertainty on the Creative Confidence Podcast. The first episode features Simone Stolzoff, author of How to Not Know, on why certainty is so seductive. Subscribe to catch the next conversations as they're released.
Read the book
The Uncertainty Toolkit: How to Feel Calmer, Happier, and More Confident in an Uncertain World by Sam Conniff.
Take the quiz
Visit uncertaintyexperts.com to take a navigating uncertainty quiz, learn about Sam and Catherine’s research and leadership programs, and download the full Decisiveness Crisis report.
Take a course
IDEO U's Leading for Creativity is built for leaders who want to create the conditions where great work—and the people doing it—can thrive.
About the Speaker
Sam Conniff
Founder, Uncertainty Experts & Author of The Uncertainty Toolkit
Sam Conniff is the founder of Uncertainty Experts and the author of The Uncertainty Toolkit: How to Feel Calmer, Happier, and More Confident in an Uncertain World. He is also the author of Be More Pirate, a bestseller based on the history of 17th-century pirates as social revolutionaries. Together with neuroscientist Catherine Templar Lewis, Sam has built one of the world's largest workplace research programs on uncertainty and decisiveness, drawing on more than 20,000 participants over six years, verified in partnership with University College London's Centre for the Study of Decision-Making Uncertainty.
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