Just about every decision made in business seems to rely on an accurate understanding of the future state of the world. How will the market respond to our upcoming launch? What products will our competitors release next year? How will the industry be affected by technological innovation, economic downturns, and regulatory changes? How will this employee perform in a position, and how will that one advance within the company?
Leaders often cite the answers to these questions as they explain their actions.
But if we really were accurate forecasters of future events, there would be no such thing as an unforeseen crisis. We all know that’s not the case. So if we’re so inept at thinking about the future, why the false sense of certainty?
Neuroscience offers an explanation: The future is inherently uncertain—and the brain loathes uncertainty. For our brains, the experience of uncertainty is both cognitively taxing and subjectively aversive. In fact, processing uncertainty is so unpleasant that it affects decision making, mental risk assessment, and even our ability to learn.
This is because the brain values certainty in a very similar manner to how it values food, sex, and social connection. And since a sense of certainty offers a perceived control over the environment that is in itself inherently rewarding, the brain treats uncertainty —and the inability to predict the future—as a source of deep discomfort.
Your brain versus the future
Brains are built to rely on data. As humans, we make, and rely on, unconscious inferences about tomorrow, based on yesterday’s data points. (“We are not cognitive couch potatoes awaiting the next ‘input,’” the cognitive scientist Andy Clark writes in Surfing Uncertainty, “so much as proactive predictavores.”) As humans, we constantly create meaning, evaluate and reevaluate input, and re-create our reality accordingly. To compute our prediction while reconciling the uncertainty of yet undetermined outcomes requires cognitive energy to simultaneously weigh many factors from risk to probability and desirability.
Consider trying to predict how we would feel or what we would think like in two years time. Doing so ignites a host of brain regions to process the future reality, from various prefrontal regions that modulate processing of error and discrepancy as well as comparing current states with our desired goal states—all the while calibrating what value we assigned to our realities, needs, and expectations. That processing goes all the way through subcortical structures that trigger physiological stress responses. That stress response is designed to aid in reducing the level of uncertainty by increasing attention, learning capability, and neuronal connectivity. However, if such a state is chronic, it overloads the system and hinders optimal cognition.
The reason uncertainty is aversive, and thus stressful, is that the brain’s most important duty is to keep us safe—a task it performs by continuously surveilling the environment and assessing whether the stimuli it encounters constitute a threat to our survival. And since the brain has evolved to err on the side of caution, its default setting is to treat anything novel, ambiguous, or uncertain as inherently aversive. A gained sense of certainty—even when based on inaccurate or incomplete information—activates a reward response , while an increased level of uncertainty activates a threat response that is often processed similarly to a conflict or error detection.
When humans were first evolving, the ability to predict events months or years in the future wasn’t relevant to our survival. “Our brains evolved to manage the needs of the now and of the not-too-distant future—your immediate environment, and short-term goals for food, water, shelter, and child-rearing,” said Kevin Ochsner, a social cognitive neuroscientist at Columbia University, speaking on a panel at this year’s NeuroLeadership Summit. “Back then, the pace of life was slow and consistent. The seasons changed on a temporally slow scale,” he added. “So we only had to deal with the occasional intense acute but short-lived threat.”
Since modern humans are walking around with the same neural architecture as our early human ancestors, our own brains are equally ill-suited to predicting future events. Although our brains are actually fairly good at using sensory data to foresee events in the very-near term—enabling us to perform such minor feats of prediction as moving our hands to catch a fast-moving baseball—we’re rather inaccurate at forecasting events even a few minutes into the future. As a result, we tend to avoid thinking about the future at all.
It’s not just that we fail to plan for future events. Uncertainty is so aversive that our brains create false certainty about the future even when actual certainty is impossible, making the assumption, for instance, that things will always be the way they are now—a bias fittingly known as the “End of History Illusion.”
Of course, assuming things will stay the same is no way to prepare for the change the future inevitably brings—especially if you’re trying to run an organization. So what’s the solution? To accept that we’re not naturally suited to thinking about the future and devise science-backed strategies for doing so in a purposeful way.
What organizations can do about the future
The first step is to strive not for certainty, but for clarity, says Bob Johansen, author of Leaders Make the Future: Ten New Leadership Skills for an Uncertain World. Given that the future is inherently unpredictable, we’ll never have certainty about what the future will bring. But what we can have, says Johansen, is clarity—which he defines as knowing your organization’s purpose, vision, values.
To achieve this kind of clarity, we need to accept that the future is inherently unpredictable and focus instead on the questions that actually can be answered. When organizations create clarity by answering those critical questions about their goals, their vision, and their purpose, they prepare themselves to respond nimbly to whatever the future brings.
Since the prefrontal cortex has limited cognitive capacity at a time, focusing on too many things leads to feeling overwhelmed and prone to error. The solution is to focus on the essential rather than trying to be exhaustive, to aim for the clarity of higher-order goals rather than exhaustively seeking certainty. In the last few years, for instance, we partnered with Microsoft to reimagine their leadership principles, helping organize 100 leadership competencies into just six words: Create clarity, generate energy, deliver success. That way, when novel situations inevitably arise, these principles are mentally handy for thinking through things. Did that email create or reduce clarity? Did that meeting generate energy? The right leadership models, in other words, are the ones that can help you better sift through information, and become a more informed and aligned with your fellow predictavores. While we will never become perfect forecasters of events, working with the brain’s natural predispositions can better equip us to work with the future as it becomes the present. While we can’t know what’s going to happen, we can know what to do.
Kamila Sip, Jay Dixit, and David Rock work at the Neuroleadership Institute.