How Uncertainty Tolerance can decrease risk in decision making 

Sam Conniff, founder of The Uncertainty Experts, partnered with The Decision-making and Uncertainty Laboratory at the University College of London to find out how we can harness the power of uncertainty.

The lab spent 10 years studying the way decisions are made and came up with Conviction Narrative Theory (CNT). It involves embodied cognition – which Sam says is a scientific way of describing gut instinct. The central idea is we all have two brains which we use in decision making. Our body and our brain. Our body picks up about 50 million bits of information, at the same time as our brain can only deal with 50.

“When you walk into a room, you can feel if you trust someone, if you are safe, the temperature, or whatever. Your body is making all these assessments. Meanwhile your brain is trying to decide what to drink,” Sam explains.

In other words, one of the key tools for making decisions, when the outcome is uncertain, is your gut instinct.

Furthermore, CNT proffers the idea that our brain isn’t clued into abstract concepts such as time, so you can trick it into imagining a future scenario where a decision must be made, and then monitoring how that decision makes you feel. To help your team build on their Uncertainty Tolerance run them through the exercise below.

The exercise

Think of a decision you need to make. Let’s say it is as simple as what you and your family will have for dinner that night. Will it be buying a takeaway meal, or going home to cook a homemade meal?

Picture yourself in each scenario.

Picture going to the restaurant to pick up the meal on the way home from work, and paying for the meal for your family. 

 Now picture yourself spending an hour making dinner for your family, using ingredients you already have in pantry and fridge.

The key here is to imagine you are in each scenario. Simulate the environment in your mind as much as you can, think about what might be said and done in each one. What you are trying to do is get in touch with how it feels to be in each scenario.

Sam says by doing this you will experience sensations in your body that are akin to if you were in the restaurant paying for the takeaway, or in your kitchen preparing the meal.

You can then come back from the future and ask, ‘which one made me feel better – buying the takeaway or preparing the meal?’ That’s allowing your gut instinct (the 50 million receptors in your body), to give your brain a steer on what the best option is.