The other day I was asked if I was worried about uncertainty. This was asked in the context of some ambiguity in our 2025 plans at work. Here I just want to share some of the thoughts on the topic.

My answer was: “A person has to be a psychopath to not worry about uncertainty at all. We, as humans, seek safety and security. At the same time, the biggest of our successes come from uncertainty and taking risks.” (*)

Not knowing what to choose is one big source of uncertainty and anxiety, the drain of indecision takes out your energy and you get stuck in dreaded “analysis-paralysis” . The reason for this seems to be our nature of being afraid to lose something, even if it is a prospect of future opportunity. For instance, you might have a possibility to get promoted in the current team, which you will lose if you switch to another team.

Do you know the origin of the word “DECIDE” ? It’s from Latin decidere which combines two words: de- ‘off’ + caedere ‘cut’. Yeah, to decide, we have to cut off something.

I took some risks (changing jobs, moving countries) in the past and believe I was rewarded for taking them and had some failures in other cases (financial setback on home purchase). I was wondering if there is a sure way to deal with the feeling of uncertainty and that grueling waiting time between making a decision and knowing the outcome of that decision.

Taking inspiration by thinking about people who dealt with risks and uncertainties isn’t always helpful. Popular culture is overhyping people who succeeded by taking risks – please know that for every single billionaire out there who miraculously made their startup successful there is an ocean of people who failed. Survivorship bias in play (**).

Thinking about people who have to deal with major uncertainties right now doesn’t help either. For instance, many of my fellow Ukrainians face uncertainties of the unthinkable levels, they lose homes, jobs, loved ones, and the future is unclear. Objectively my uncertainties compared to theirs are negligible.

Rolling up the sleeves and just getting into the flow of work and just being in that mode of constantly solving problems and mitigating risks helps as long as you can maintain that state. I see this as a mode of “fight” in a survivorship physiology (***) – fighting is cool and can get you far, it’s just that sustainability is difficult.

It appears that the easiest to deal with uncertainty is multi-fold: having a very solid safety net, having a streak of risk-reward successes that gives you confidence boost (think of emboldened territorial lobsters (****)), and actually enjoying the process itself. But all in all, you just have to embrace the uncertainty as something natural and impossible to avoid. Absolute 0 uncertainty means you are dead – I will get to it.

There is this concept of the cone of uncertainty often used in  risk management. The idea is fairly simple – as the time passes more and more risks are either realized or mitigated and eventually residual risk reaches near 0. In the context of project management this happens closer to the project end. I have joined many projects where it was absolutely unclear what I had to do and how the things will evolve, few months in and it gained some structure in my head, few more months and there is a feeling of being on top of the things, and eventually few more months in it is all done and ready and you are on the outlook for the next big thing. So, my friend, don’t worry, embrace the uncertainty and deal with ambiguity, as they say.

In our lives the moment we are born the uncertainty of what will come of us is the highest and as the time passes we become who we are today with the uncertainties of today. Now to sound overly morbid, we reach a personal level of 0 risk at the time of our death! So enjoy non-0 risk and uncertainty!

There is more to come ;)

What are your thoughts on risk, decision making, and uncertainty?