The negative impacts of uncertainty on organisational performance are well documented. Uncertainty has been shown to:
- Increase levels of individual stress
- Reduce employee motivation
- Reduce team collaboration
- Slow decision-making
- Reduce innovation
- Impact financial performance
To be honest, it feels depressing just to write that out. But if you’re reading this in 2025, you probably don’t even need the list. If you’re like most people, you will have been feeling the effects of uncertainty first-hand.
There is a general assumption that uncertainty “just is” and we need to learn to live with it. But although uncertainty can never be eliminated, it can be controlled.
What creates uncertainty?
Uncertainty is a lack of information or clarity about what’s happening around us. Sometimes our feelings of uncertainty are grounded in reality – the world is complex, and outcomes can be unpredictable. Sometimes small changes can have dramatic unintended consequences (illustrated by the “butterfly effect,” where a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil could conceivably contribute to a tornado in Texas).
But sometimes feelings of uncertainty aren’t because something is unpredictable, it’s just that we lack understanding about how it works, or perhaps just as importantly, whether it matters.
The iconic Rumsfeld Matrix (named after Donald Rumsfeld, the former U.S. Secretary of Defense) helps illustrate this.
One of the downsides of having access to SO MUCH INFORMATION is that our level of awareness about what’s going on in the world has DRAMATICALLY increased (capitalisations still don’t do this sentence justice). But much of our understanding of it is rudimentary at best. We know about many more things, but because we don’t understand them, they create a sense of perceived environmental uncertainty.
Four ways to control uncertainty
There are four ways to control uncertainty — though some are less realistic than others.
The least realistic way is to tune out: get off social media, switch off the news, and reduce your level of awareness to your immediate environment. This is the level of awareness we’ve been conditioned over millennia of evolution to cope with. However, it’s unrealistic because most organisations are subject to forces that sit well outside the immediately observable environment. So let’s look at the other ways.
The second least realistic is to try to increase our level of understanding. Of course, if we try to develop a deep understanding across the breadth of human knowledge available on the interwebs, we’re going to run into a little problem called “time.” So this is also not that realistic.
The third option is to filter all that information for the things that really matter, and stop caring about the ones that don’t. There’s a small issue, though: we don’t always know whether something matters until we understand it better. Still, this is at least a more realistic option than the two previous ones.
The best option is to both prioritise what really matters and then seek to understand the most important things more deeply. By doing so, we can let go of the anxiety attached to things that don’t really matter and reduce uncertainty about the things that do.
I’ve tried to capture this idea in what I’m going to call the Waller Matrix. It’s similar to the Rumsfeld Matrix, but the y-axis is Importance rather than Awareness. Hopefully, it’s fairly self-explanatory.
Practical steps
The Waller Matrix is actually a derivative of a well-used futures tool that prioritises trends based on uncertainty and impact. I use it in my Strategic and Emerging Risks workshops with teams so they can create a shared understanding of:
- What we have certainty about and can get on with
- What we need to explore or experiment with further
- What doesn’t really matter (at least for now)
These workshops are a super engaging and highly practical way of getting people on the same page, aligning work, and relieving some of the stress and anxiety associated with uncertainties that don’t really matter.
If you’re a leader looking to do something that’s both good for your team and good for the individuals in it, this is a great place to start.
Simon
