Radical Uncertainty: Decision-making for an unknowable future

by John Kay

Victims of ideology or arrogance, often talking more than they listen, such people fail to acknowledge that on almost every subject, someone else knows more than they do.

Good decision-makers, by contrast, listen respectfully, and range widely to seek relevant advice and facts before they form a preliminary view. And when they do arrive at a view, they invite challenge to it, before drawing the discussion to a conclusion. Well conducted, the case method of the business school is an exercise in teaching future executives to think in this way.

An approach based around visions and mission statements – a wish-driven strategy, founded not on a sense of what the company is but on what it would like to become, reminiscent of children debating whether to become a brain surgeon or an engine driver.

How Doctors Think in a book with that title. Groopman describes mistakes he and his colleagues have made in diagnosis, attributing many to the standard list of ‘biases’ familiar to readers of behavioural economics. But most are in fact the result of excessive attention to prior probabilities – ‘he looked healthy when he walked into the surgery’, ‘there’s a lot of it about’, ‘most of my patients with symptom x have disease y’. The good doctor listens, tests, asks questions, and only then arrives at a provisional diagnosis, treading a fine line between correctly identifying the symptoms which support a provisional diagnosis and being too quick to identify what he or she expects to find. That is why good doctors discuss difficult cases with their colleagues, and many groups of clinicians institutionalise that practice.