Loading…. the Age of Shit Decisions

We’ve had the Age of Disruption, the Age of Experience, the Age of Innovation. Welcome to the Age of Shit Decisions.

Uncertainty is killing our ability to make good decisions. Or rather, our inability to deal with uncertainty is sweeping us headfirst into an Age of Shit Decisions.

Doesn’t matter if you’re trying to make everyday choices or if you are in a high-stakes leadership position, uncertainty disrupts our cognitive abilities and amplifies our emotions. Our mental acuity gets fuzzy, our beliefs harden, and without realising it we reconfigure how we think and lead, all to lessen the pain of uncertainty.

 As even a cursory glance at the news headlines reveals, the world in 2025 is a highly unpredictable place. The geopolitical shifts, emerging conflicts, cost of living crisis, climate impacts and AI-driven disruption of the past few years have all combined to create an unstable mix of forces that are impossible to predict.

 Anyone who is responsible for making important decisions – for themselves, for their clients, for their employees, for citizens – must confront how uncertainty affects them, and how to mitigate its worst effects.

 This is your brain on uncertainty

 Research into the impact of uncertainty on mental health point to a broadly held truth: if you can’t deal with uncertainty, you are more likely to suffer from anxiety, depression, obsessive compulsive disorder, and post-traumatic stress disorder.

 People who struggle with the unknown display sharper emotional swings, heightened vigilance, and a perceivable drop in mental flexibility. Instead of adapting, they seek shelter in rigid thought processes and cling to fixed beliefs. They resist ambiguity and narrow their perspective.

 It doesn’t take a PhD in Neuroscience to picture what effect this has on decision-making. Environments marked by high levels of uncertainty - like ours - tend to lead to people adopting more defensive strategies. They avoid experimentation, follow groupthink, or flood their minds with vast amounts of information. And while this may provide temporary relief from the existential pain of uncertainty, it diminishes the quality of their decisions and can lead to a more fragile state of mind in the long run.

 The more we fear uncertainty, the worse our decision-making becomes.

Bullshit is a coping mechanism

Truth is, we’re amid an ongoing and intensifying psychological shift. And it’s largely thanks to the world we’ve created around us over the past few decades.

Consider the uncertainty brought about by the pandemic, the effects of social media on our self-esteem and mental health, and job displacements due to AI and other technologies. There’s widespread concern over our changing (and increasingly hostile) climate. We face a torrent of misinformation, disinformation and outright bullshit.

Our brains were not made to sustain this level of input, change and uncertainty.

It's become all too easy to revert to caution over curiosity. Belief instead of inquiry. We’re relying on what we feel are ‘safe bets’ - tools and beliefs that we could rely on to overcome previous challenges - to meet tomorrow’s challenges. And it’s not working.

Over time, this mindset will continue to erode our innovation, our adaptability, and the very qualities we need to navigate our volatile conditions.

In our attempts at reducing uncertainty - or at least its effects on us - we not only gather more information, but construct overly simplified worldviews that explain everything neatly, even if inaccurately. We take an easy lie over a hard truth. A bad answer instead of no answer at all.

 The future belongs to leaders who can hold their nerve

This puts leaders in a tough spot. Researchers found that leaders who express uncertainty  are perceived as less competent or effective. We want our leaders to be truthful, but we also want them to project clarity and confidence.

I’d argue the ability to effectively deal with uncertainty is a core skill to cultivate for anyone that wants to deal with our unfolding future effectively. We need leaders that are agile, can make sense of large amounts of often conflicting information, and remain resilient about their core values and vision.

It’s not about eliminating doubt, but of integrating it into your decision-making process without paralysis.

Whether it’s designing simulations or forecasting market behaviour - or, in our case, embracing game theory and behavioural modelling to give us plausible and rational frameworks for decision-making - we can’t afford to treat uncertainty as some kind of temporary state. A glitch to be corrected. An anomaly. It’s a condition we need to understand.

And how we engage with it, personally and professionally, will shape our world in the years ahead.