Leading through Change: The only certainty is uncertainty

By-Zara Whysall

One of the biggest issues on many of our clients’ minds currently, is “How can we best lead our people through change and uncertainty?” We’ve all read articles or blogs which start with the clichés about change being the ‘new normal’ and ambiguity being universal, so I’m going dive straight in. We know the context. Being a psychologist, what I want to talk about is the brain's response to situations characterised by uncertainty, since (crudely speaking) it’s the brain that drives behaviour and behaviour is what drives companies.

The bad news? Our brain doesn’t like uncertainty.

This makes complete sense when you consider the brain’s main job is to keep us alive, which includes looking out for anything that could threaten our survival. And when I say ‘keep a look out’ I really mean ‘be absolutely and positively paranoid about anything that looks vaguely suspicious!’ Consider the lookout on a ship, whose job is to sit in the crow’s nest and look for danger. Uncertainty acts like a thick fog surrounding the ship; you can’t see where you’re going, so you could be about to sail straight into an iceberg. Uncertainty = a threat. The brain interprets the fog (uncertainty) as if it were a looming iceberg and signals the alarm.