Why Being Certain Means Being Wrong

Harvard Business Review: Why Being Certain Means Being Wrong

Of all the headwinds we face as decision-makers, the power of one overshadows all others: our need for certainty. It is typically more important for us to feel right, than to be right — a difference that didn't matter much in the lives of our ancestors, but now matters a lot. …

… Just as the few thousand sperm are stronger than the millions that perished along the way, some ideas are favored over others: our "fittest" explanations are those that cohere with all of our other beliefs and values — they are easily integrated with everything we already "know." But just as one sperm will get to the egg first, even if more genetically fit sperm are available, the urgent drive to reduce the tension of uncertainty pushes us to accept the first reasonable explanation we craft. Our mind becomes "fertilized" and the calm feeling of knowing instantly infuses us, stopping our search for alternative explanations.

The lockdown of our minds serves an important purpose: Generations of our ancestors wouldn't have survived had they constantly second-guessed their conclusions. In a harsh environment characterized by straightforward challenges that demanded quick responses, an indecisive caveman was a dead one. The rush to certainty became our standard operating procedure for two reasons: i) because we needed speedy thinking, and ii) because speed did not force a significant tradeoff in accuracy. The risk of interpretive error is low when you are confronted by a charging tiger or bush of lush berries because the cause-effect relationships in these straightforward situations are not convoluted or ambiguous. Even today, the majority of micro-decisions we make every hour are fairly straightforward, so there is no reason to second-guess or reflect on the limitations of our senses and intuitions.

But the whole speed-accuracy tradeoff falls apart in a world that tosses up complex problems. The need to be certain gets in the way of accuracy when it comes to problems that have multiple, interwoven causal factors that are difficult to unbundle. Complex problems require exploration, multiple perspectives, and a variety of possible explanations, before it is safe to draw any conclusions. Many complex problems can only be tackled with experimentation because they do not converge to definitive solutions. But a mind that is "fertilized" by the first satisfying interpretation is closed to the more subtle and complicated explanations that are often better. It is our mind's lockdown feature that makes certainty the #1 enemy of effective decision-making in the face of complexity. Think of all the business failures that were avoidable if it weren't for the hubris of leaders who were unwilling to revisit their faltering strategies, or the public policy failures that could have been mitigated, or our personal relationships that would run so much more smoothly if we weren't so certain that we were right all the time. But there is an antidote to premature certainty: Adopting a mindset of "provisional truth."

Provisional truth requires that we think of our explanations as hypotheses — always subject to replacement based on new information or alternative ways of structuring existing information. …

This sounds like what I call tentative finality. We often must take action amid risk and uncertainty. So we often must come at an issue with some degree of finality, but we must always hold the finality tentatively, being open to new learning.