Uncertainty and the Stories We Tell Ourselves: How Crisis Distorts Thinking — and What to Do About It
In times where uncertainty seems to be the one constant — a reflection drawn from years of working inside crisis cells.
Crisis, at its core, is defined by two forces: uncertainty and time pressure. You do not know enough, and you do not have the luxury of waiting until you do. Everything that follows — the decisions, the tensions, the errors — flows from that fundamental condition.
Something I have observed many times, in very different contexts, is what happens to our thinking when those two forces combine.
The Stories We Build Under Pressure
When a crisis unfolds, one of the first things that happens — often within minutes — is that people begin building a story. A narrative about what is happening, why it happened, and what will happen next. It feels like understanding. It looks like analysis. But in many cases, it is neither.
The brain does not tolerate uncertainty well. Faced with the unknown, it fills the gap — through hypotheses, beliefs, causal narratives. Researchers describe it as a prediction machine, constantly constructing representations of the world to make action possible. In normal circumstances, this is an extraordinary capacity. In crisis, it can become a trap.
The danger is not in having hypotheses. It is in what happens when we chain them together — and when we confuse them with facts.
Under pressure, teams naturally work through scenarios. In doing so, they stack hypotheses one after another, each building on the previous one, with the appearance of a causal chain. But there is something we rarely pause to consider: if the first assumption is uncertain, and the second is built on the first, and the third on the second — then with each addition, the likelihood of the whole story being true diminishes.
Linking uncertain assumptions does not strengthen them. It weakens the entire structure. And yet, at the end of the exercise, the result looks like a coherent, logical narrative. It feels solid. The fragility has become invisible — buried beneath the fluency of the story.
It is a house of cards. A construction of our own making that no longer reflects the real situation, but our representation of it.
As Philip K. Dick once wrote: “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” This is precisely the discipline that crisis demands — the ability to distinguish between what is genuinely established and what we have built to fill the silence of what we do not know.
What Useful Anticipation Actually Looks Like
So what does anticipation look like in this context?
Not the construction of a complete story about how things will unfold. A detailed causal narrative built on incomplete information is not prediction — it is fiction wearing the clothes of certainty. And in crisis, that fiction can be expensive.
But anticipation is still necessary. The question is how far to go.
In crisis, it is necessary to anticipate the worst — and to be ready for it. This is not pessimism. It is a discipline. Preparing for the worst means that when it arrives, the shock does not paralyse. The team has already looked at it, named it, and accepted that it is possible. That preparation protects the capacity to think and act when others freeze.
There is another kind of anticipation — the one that builds the possible path toward resolution. Here, useful anticipation focuses on the next two or three steps, not on an elaborate scenario that depends on circumstances not yet understood. Developing a full response only makes sense when there is enough context to ensure it is meaningful.
The Anticipation That Truly Matters
The deeper anticipation — the one that holds under real pressure — is narrower and more honest.
It is a contract with ourselves and with each other: a clear position on what matters most and what we are willing to accept as the situation unfolds. Not a story about what will happen, but a conscious stance — one that holds when the pressure rises.
That kind of anticipation does not require certainty. It requires clarity — about who we are, what we stand for, and where our limits lie. And that clarity is best built before the crisis, not during it.
The teams that navigate uncertainty with the most coherence are rarely those with the best predictions. They are those who have done this quiet, honest work beforehand — and who hold that contract steady when everything around them is shifting.