Uncertainty and the Stories We Tell Ourselves: How Crisis Distorts Thinking — and What to Do About It

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. The decisions, the tensions, the errors that follow all flow from that fundamental condition.

What interests me here 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. In many cases, it is neither.

The brain does not tolerate uncertainty well. Faced with the unknown, it fills the gap through hypotheses, beliefs and 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 does not lie in having hypotheses. It lies in what happens when we chain them together and 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. 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 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 the discipline that crisis demands: distinguishing 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

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 becomes fiction, and in crisis fiction can be expensive.

Anticipation is still necessary. The question is how far to go.

It is necessary to anticipate the worst and to be ready for it. This is a discipline, not pessimism. 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. Useful anticipation focuses on the next two or three steps. It does not develop an elaborate scenario that depends on circumstances not yet understood. 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. It is a conscious stance that holds when the pressure rises, not a story about what will happen.

That kind of anticipation does not require certainty. It requires clarity: about who we are, what we stand for, and where our limits lie. 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 work beforehand, and who hold that contract steady when everything around them is shifting.