Build Your Tolerance for Uncertainty, with Simone Stolzoff

**Dave Stachowiak** (0:00)
I'm not sure about you, but I very much dislike uncertainty. And yet, basically the job of leadership is not only to deal with it, but to help others thrive in the midst of it. In this episode, How to Build Your Tolerance for Uncertainty so you can lead more effectively. This is Coaching for Leaders, episode 796

**SPEAKER_2** (0:22)
Produced by Innovate Learning Maximizing human potential Greetings to you from Orange County, California.

**Dave Stachowiak** (0:34)
This is Coaching for Leaders, and I'm your host, Dave Stachowiak. Leaders aren't born, they're made. And this weekly show helps leaders thrive at key inflection points. And what do inflection points bring? Uncertainty. It's just the nature of leadership. It's certainly the nature of leadership today.
And how we navigate uncertainty and for leaders especially, how do we build our tolerance for uncertainty? It's something that if we can do, helps us to be so much more effective in our work.
Yes, for ourselves, but more importantly, for the people we lead, for the organizations that we have the privilege to support. Today, I'm so glad to be able to have a conversation to help us get better at this. I'm so pleased to welcome to the show Simone Stolzoff. Simone is an author and journalist who explores big questions about work, meaning, and identity. A former design lead at the global innovation firm IDEO, his work has been featured in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and on the TED stage. He is the author of How to Not Know, The Value of Uncertainty in a World That Demands Answers. Simone, such a pleasure to have you here.

**Simone Stolzoff** (1:47)
Thanks so much for having me on, Dave.

**Dave Stachowiak** (1:48)
Boy, the world does demand answers when we become leaders. Our tendency so much is to want to provide answers.
I think about how much as human beings in general, we love certainty and we just don't have a lot of it right now in the world, especially now, do we?

**Simone Stolzoff** (2:10)
Yeah. I think there's two things going on. One is that the world is becoming more uncertain.
There's this researcher from Stanford named Nicholas Bloom, and he's been tracking global uncertainty since the early 80s, and he's found the five highest measurements since he began collecting data have all occurred in the last five years. You think about the pandemic and shifting tariff policies and wars overseas and AI, it's no secret that the world is incredibly uncertain. But there's another trend that's less often discussed, which is equally important, which is that as a society, our tolerance for uncertainty is in decline. This is often attributed to the rise of the Internet, and more specifically the rise of mobile phones.
And the idea being that when we have access to limitless information, when we can track the real-time updates of the state of hormones or the real-time location of our children, access to more information hasn't necessarily made us any wiser. It often just fuels our anxiety. And phones also create the expectation that answers should be readily available. I know for me personally, maybe 10 years ago, I would have been okay not knowing the name of a given actor, but now I feel an almost involuntary need to reach into my phone.
So the world is getting more uncertain. Our tolerance for uncertainty is in decline. And that's why so many leaders and the employees that they lead feel anxious and unmoored.

**Dave Stachowiak** (3:42)
And isn't it interesting how AI has just thrown gasoline onto that fire too of wanting to have more certainty? I may think about just the drives I have with our family in our car, of now that ChatGPT is literally a push button on the steering wheel where you can trigger it with carplay and ask any question. The conversations that come up in everyday interactions just like in a vehicle, all of a sudden you have this expert you can talk to at any moment which on one level is super cool and interesting and rich and on another level I think it's interesting how we don't grapple with the, I don't know as much in conversations on a regular basis, at least I find that I'm doing that less and it's just like it's a powerful illustration of the point you just made.

**Simone Stolzoff** (4:36)
Yeah, I think there's two things. One is that these chatbots or even Google before that create the expectation that you should be able to get definitive answers to every question, and you and I both know there are some questions like, what is the future of my career or how will the economy progress in the next two years that can't be easily answered by a chatbot. The second thing is they rob us of the practice of sitting with what we don't know.