Decision-Making Under Uncertainty

Judgment, bias, and acting effectively when information is incomplete and time is limited

Perfect Information Is a Fantasy

Most of the decisions that matter are made with incomplete information, under time pressure, and with consequences that cannot be undone. There is no pause button. No rewind. No second run.

Waiting for certainty feels prudent and responsible. But waiting is itself a decision—and often the wrong one. In the environments that matter most, uncertainty isn’t a problem to be solved. It’s a condition to be managed.

That was true in combat. It’s true in boardrooms, hospitals, crisis response, and personal life. Anyone promising clarity before action is either inexperienced or delusional.

The Myth of the Rational Decision-Maker

Traditional decision theory assumes a rational actor: clear goals, stable preferences, and complete information. A clean model. A nice, tidy abstraction.

But that’s not how we humans make decisions.

Real decisions are made with emotion, bias, and incomplete or outdated mental models—within social systems that shape what people see, say, suppress, and do. Pretending otherwise doesn’t make decisions better. It just obscures the real dynamics.

Decision quality is not the absence of bias. That’s impossible.

It’s the ability to recognize bias, compensate for it, and design processes that work within human limits rather than deny them.

Risk Is Not Uncertainty—and Confusing Them Is Dangerous

This distinction matters more than most people realize.

Risk exists when probabilities are known and outcomes are bounded. Dice, insurance tables, and engineering tolerances—these all have known probabilities and statistically bounded outcomes.

Uncertainty, on the other hand, exists when probabilities are unknown and outcomes are emergent. Human systems. Adversaries. Novel situations.

Treating uncertainty as if it were risk leads to false precision and overconfidence. You get clean numbers attached to dirty assumptions. Spreadsheets that look authoritative but collapse under contact with complex reality.

Moreover, in complex environments, precision can be a liability.

Judgment Beats Optimization

When uncertainty dominates, optimization fails.

There is no “best” move—only better or worse ones, judged in context and under constraints. Many of the hardest decisions I’ve been part of had no good options—only least-bad ones.

That’s where judgment matters.

Judgment isn’t about speed or decisiveness alone. It’s the integration of experience, pattern recognition, moral reasoning, and—critically—awareness of one’s own limits.

Good judgment knows when to act, when to wait, and when to distribute the decision because the system sees more than any individual ever could.

Bias Is Not the Enemy—Unexamined Bias Is

Bias is unavoidable. It can also be useful.

Pattern recognition saves time. Indeed, the human brain is a pattern-recognition machine. Unfortunately, our brains get it wrong as often as they get it right. So, we rely on heuristics, simple rules of thumb, like “Don’t debate. Test.” Such rules can be adaptive and reduce cognitive load. Without them, decision-making grinds to a halt. But overreliance on heuristics, or using them in the wrong context, can lead to bias.

The danger isn’t bias itself. It’s bias that goes unexamined and unchecked.

Overconfidence (what Kahneman called WYSIATI—what you see is all there is). Confirmation bias. Authority bias. Groupthink. Black-and-White (or Either-Or) thinking. Bias is like the Devil: It goes by many names.

The solution, then, is not to eliminate bias, but to surface it—before it hardens into a pattern of behavior. Good decision systems expose assumptions early, invite challenge, and create friction where it matters most — right where the work is done.

Time Pressure Changes Everything

Under stress, the blinders come on and cognitive bandwidth narrows. Emotional responses intensify, and a return to old habits — old patterns of behavior — accelerates. When the pressure is on, we don’t rise to the level of our expectations. We fall to the level of our training, our behavioral norms, and our culture. Archilochus, a Greek poet and soldier, said this more than 2,500 years ago. It’s still true today.

This is why decision-making under pressure cannot be separated from preparation. Not planning in the traditional sense—but conditioning: rehearsing judgment, building flexible shared mental models, and establishing norms that hold when thinking degrades.

Why Teams Matter More Than Individuals

Decision-making is rarely an individual act, no matter how much we romanticize the lone decider.

Teams expand perspective. They reduce blind spots. They catch errors early—but only if dissent is allowed, rank doesn’t silence signals from below, and psychological meaningfulness, safety, and availability exist. If I believe my ideas can change outcomes, I won’t be excoriated or humiliated for voicing a concern or a novel idea, and I have the requisite knowledge, skill, and experience—if those three stars align, I’ll engage.

The best decision-makers I knew surrounded themselves with good people willing to disagree with them, not reflexively but honestly.

Silence or “courteous compliance” is not alignment. It’s often fear.

Simple Rules Outperform Complex Plans

Under uncertainty, detailed plans degrade quickly. Why? Because reality moves faster than the model and in ways the model can’t predict.

What endures are simple rules—decision filters that guide action without prescribing behavior.

• Prioritize life or livelihood—the brain doesn’t really make a distinction
• Protect the team
• Maintain flexibility
• Preserve optionality

These aren’t slogans. They are examples of meaningful constraints. They narrow the decision space while leaving room for judgment and adaptation. Strategies and tactics require judgment and adaptation to unique circumstances. But bias distorts judgment. You see the quandary?

Acting Without Knowing—and Staying Adaptive

Effective decision-making requires a delicate balance: acting decisively while remaining open to being wrong.

Commitment without rigidity. Confidence without certainty. These are mindsets, and mindset and execution are all that we can control in a complex world, not outcomes. But with the right mindset and faith in our ability to execute well — not perfectly, but well — we can certainly shape the outcome.

From a complexity perspective, then, decisions are probes into the environment. The response matters as much as the choice itself. Leaders who cling to decisions instead of monitoring their effects (a sunk-cost fallacy) stop learning—and start compounding errors.

Learning Loops: The Only Advantage That Scales

Fast, accurate, and interpretable feedback improves future decisions. Slow or suppressed feedback, or feedback distorted by bias, guarantees the repetition of mistakes.

The leader’s role is not to be right all the time. It’s to create systems that learn faster than the environment changes. That means honest after-action reviews. Normalized course correction. Rewarding belief-updating instead of punishing it.

Adaptation is not weakness, not by any means. It’s competence under uncertainty.

When Not Deciding Is the Right Call

Judgment includes restraint.

Sometimes the best move is to delay, observe, and let the signal emerge. Not all moments demand action—some demand patience.

Knowing or intuiting the difference is part of the craft.

What Good Decision-Makers Actually Do

Good decision-makers and good teams don’t eliminate uncertainty. They don’t rely on perfect models. They don’t hide doubt behind false confidence. They make the best call they can with what they have. They stay attuned to feedback. They adjust quickly. And they take responsibility for the consequences.

Good decision-making under uncertainty isn’t about being right; it’s about getting it right. It’s about staying in the game long enough to learn—and keeping the people around you whole enough to keep playing.

Working With Leaders in Complex Environments

I work with senior leaders, teams, and institutions operating in conditions of uncertainty, risk, and consequence. If this essay resonates, you can learn more about my work or contact me directly.