.png)
Uncertainty Is a Tax, and You Are Overpaying It
Every decision that lands on your desk arrives with something attached, and it is not the decision. It is the not-knowing. Which of the two venues. Whether to flag the thing the finance director said in passing. Whether the new hire is fine or whether you are the only one who has noticed. The decision itself is usually small. The not-knowing is what fills the afternoon.
In 2025 I drafted a post that called this feeling your superpower. Uncertainty, it said, is where growth lives; trust your gut, celebrate every decision, keep a diary, treat it all as an experiment. I have read it again, and I am not going to publish it, because the research says something less flattering and more useful.
Uncertainty is a tax. You pay it on every decision, you cannot opt out, and the interesting question is not whether to pay it but whether you are overpaying. Most people are. There are four specific ways of overpaying, each one measured, and each one has the same shape: it makes the not-knowing stop without making the decision any better.
So this is the bill, itemised. Four line items, the study behind each, what it is actually costing you, and then the rebate: the four moves that reduce the tax rather than disguising it. There is a record to download and a short return to fill in against a decision you are sitting on right now.
What you will get out of this
Why not-knowing feels the way it does: the study in which stress tracked unpredictability itself, and peaked at exactly 50/50
The four ways people overpay: more information, an open option, a gut with no licence, and a verdict delivered by the outcome, each with the evidence
Why the seventeenth spreadsheet raises your confidence and not your accuracy, and why you open it anyway
The reversible decision that leaves you less satisfied and quietly uses up your working memory
The two conditions under which your intuition has earned a vote, and the two common decisions where it has not
Why you will misjudge your own good decisions when they go badly, replicated in 692 people and 91 doctors, and the one-page record that stops it
A decision record to download and a tax return to run against the decision you are avoiding this week
Why it feels like a tax
Start with the feeling, because the feeling is what drives the overpaying.
In the study I keep coming back to, 45 people learned which of a set of pictures predicted a mild electric shock. Sometimes the picture predicted the shock nine times in ten, sometimes seven in ten, sometimes five in ten. Throughout, the researchers measured stress three ways: what people said, how their pupils dilated, and how their skin conducted. All three tracked the same thing, and it was not the shock. It was the unpredictability. Stress rose and fell with how much of the uncertainty could not be learned away, and that kind of uncertainty is at its highest when the odds are fifty-fifty. Cortisol confirmed it.
That is worth sitting with. The thing your body is objecting to, when a decision is open and you do not know which way it goes, is not the bad outcome. It is the not-knowing. Which means that anything that makes the not-knowing stop will feel like relief, whether or not it has improved the decision by a single degree. That is the tax. And the four line items below are all, at bottom, ways of buying that relief.
Line 1. The seventeenth spreadsheet
What you tell yourself. I need more information before I can decide.
What the evidence says. Past a point, more information makes you surer and not better, and the sureness is the expensive part. In three studies where people were given progressively more relevant information for a judgement, their confidence rose faster than their accuracy, and the gap kept widening. People do not adjust for the fact that they cannot use the extra material as well as they think they can.
A second set of experiments made it uglier. People were asked to predict basketball games. Everyone had the statistics: the win records, the halftime scores. Half of them were also told the team names. The names raised the fans' confidence, and lowered their accuracy, because knowing the names made them stop trusting the statistics. In a real betting round, the fans who knew the names earned less money and carried on believing the names had helped.
Then there is the question of why you open the seventeenth spreadsheet at all. In a preregistered study, researchers built conditions in which people were exactly as accurate but felt less confident, and watched what they did next. When confidence was low, people went looking for more information, even though they were no more likely to be wrong. You do not gather because you are inaccurate. You gather because you feel uncertain, and the gathering is a treatment for the feeling.
What it costs. The hours, obviously. But also a decision you are now more certain of and no better at, which is a worse position than being unsure of a good call, because you have stopped looking.
Line 2. The option you kept open
What you tell yourself. Let us keep it flexible. We can revisit. Run it as a pilot.
What the evidence says. Photography students in a well-known experiment chose one print to keep. Some were told the choice was final; others were told they could swap it later. The ones who could change their minds liked their print less, for weeks, and nobody had predicted that, including them. Asked beforehand, most people said they wanted the option to change their minds. The option made them less happy with what they had chosen.
A later pair of experiments found the mechanism, and it is the part that matters for anyone whose job is holding many things in their head. While a decision stays open to change, the thoughts about it stay active. Reversibility measurably reduced people's working memory capacity, and the reduced capacity predicted more regret afterwards. The open option is not parked. It is running in the background, using memory you need for everything else.
And the softer version, not deciding at all, does not buy what it promises. A 2023 meta-analysis of 59 effects looked at whether avoiding a decision reduces regret afterwards. On average it did not. The one form that reliably did was sticking with the status quo. And when the same avoidance had already led to a bad outcome before, avoiding again increased regret rather than easing it.
What it costs. Satisfaction with the choice, working memory you do not have spare, and, if the deferral is a habit, the long-run pattern the regret research keeps finding: people regret what they did not do more than what they did. That finding has been replicated, more weakly than the original, so hold it loosely. Hold the working memory finding tightly.
Line 3. The gut, given a vote it has not earned
What you tell yourself. My instincts are usually right.
What the evidence says. The 2025 draft called your intuition a supercomputer quietly processing years of experience. The best paper on the subject was written jointly by the two researchers who had spent their careers on opposite sides of the argument, one convinced expert intuition is real, the other convinced it is mostly overconfidence, and they agreed on where the line falls. Intuition can be trusted when two conditions hold at once. The environment has to be regular enough that there are patterns to learn. And the person has to have had a long run of practice with fast, honest feedback, so that the patterns learned are the real ones.
Now look at the decisions on your desk. Your read of your executive's mood before a difficult meeting meets both conditions: hundreds of repetitions and you find out within the hour whether you were right. Your read of which candidate will work out, which supplier to sign for three years, which of two restructures will hold, meets neither. You have done it a handful of times, the feedback arrives months later if it arrives at all, and it is tangled up with a dozen other things that changed in between. Your confidence in both kinds of call feels identical from the inside. Only one of them has earned it.
What it costs. Nothing, on the calls where the gut has a licence. On the others, it costs you the process you would have run if the feeling of certainty had not turned up and told you it was unnecessary.
Line 4. The verdict, delivered by the outcome
What you tell yourself. It worked out, so it was the right call. It did not, so I got it wrong.
What the evidence says. This is the one that quietly corrupts everything you think you have learned. In the original 1988 studies, people read descriptions of decisions made on identical information and were told the outcome. They rated the same decision as better thinking, by a more competent person, when it had happened to turn out well. Asked directly, they agreed outcomes should not count. They counted them anyway.
A preregistered replication in 2023, with 692 people, found the effect larger than the original, and found it among the people who had explicitly said the outcome should not matter. Ninety-one practising doctors, asked to evaluate their own diagnosis after learning how the patient did, overrated the decision after a good outcome, underrated it after a bad one, and misremembered the weight they had given the evidence in whichever direction the outcome pointed. Professional basketball coaches changed their strategy more often after a loss than a win, including narrow losses that carried no information about whether the strategy worked, and even when the loss had been expected.
Underneath all of it is the oldest finding in the field: once you know how something turned out, you cannot recover what you knew before. The outcome looks more foreseeable than it was. Which means the honest review of a decision cannot be done from memory. Memory has already been edited.
What it costs. Every lesson you have drawn from a decision that went well, and every lesson you have drawn from one that went badly, unless the decision was written down before the outcome arrived. The 2025 draft told you to celebrate all decisions and keep a diary. Half right. What matters is not the celebrating. It is the timestamp.
The rebate
Four line items, four moves. None of them asks you to be braver or wiser. Each changes what you do, which is the only thing the research has ever found to work.
One. Write the stopping rule before you open the first tab. One sentence: what would change my mind? If you can name it, gather that and nothing else. If you cannot name it, you have already decided and are gathering for the feeling; stop and decide. The study of fast decision-makers in fast-moving firms found they used more information than slow ones, not less, but it was real-time information about what was happening now, and they held several options open at once instead of analysing one to death. The slow teams, in the researcher's phrase, oscillated between procrastination and shotgun choices against deadlines. That oscillation is what the seventeenth spreadsheet looks like from the outside.
Two. Close the door, and set a date instead of an option. Where the decision can honestly be final, make it final; the photography study says you will like it more and the memory study says you will think more clearly afterwards. Where it cannot be, replace "we can revisit" with a date on which it stops being open, and what you will look at on that date. An option with a closing date is a decision. An option without one is a tab left open in your head.
Three. Give the gut a job description. Before the feeling of certainty gets a vote, ask two questions. Have I made this kind of call many times before? Did I find out, quickly and honestly, how each one turned out? Two yeses: the gut drafts the answer and you sanity-check it. Anything else: the gut may speak, and then the process runs, which for anything that cannot be undone means a short pre-mortem, the technique I wrote about in the risk register post, or at the very least three alternatives on the table rather than one.
Four. Record the decision before the outcome, and review the record. Four lines, written the day you decide: what I knew, what I expected to happen, what would have changed my mind, when I will look at this again. Then, on the date, review the decision against the record and not against the memory, and against what you knew and not against what happened. The reflection research is specific here: in two studies with 1,128 people, reflection combined with feedback improved performance; reflection without feedback did nothing. The record is what makes the feedback usable, because it is the only version of the before that hindsight cannot rewrite.
Download: The Decision Record
One sheet, filled in twice: once before, once after. It replaces the 2025 draft's diary with something that survives contact with the outcome.
What is inside | Why it is there |
The stopping rule: what would change my mind, and by when | Because gathering without a rule is treatment for a feeling |
The gut licence check: seen it before, found out how it went | Because confidence feels the same whether or not it has been earned |
The door: final, or open until a named date | Because an open option keeps running in working memory |
The before-record: what I knew, what I expected, what I would do differently | Because hindsight will edit it otherwise |
The review: against the record, not the outcome | Because the outcome is the least reliable witness to the decision |
Free, no email wall. Print it, or keep it in the notes app beside the decisions themselves.
Frequently asked questions
Is this telling me to decide faster?
No. It is telling you to decide with a stopping rule, which sometimes means faster and sometimes means a defined amount of slower. The fast-decision research found the speed came from a method, not from nerve.
Some of my decisions really do need a lot of information.
Yes, and those are the ones with a clear answer to "what would change my mind?" The rule does not cap information. It caps information that cannot change the decision.
My executive wants to keep options open. That is not my call.
Then the move is the date, not the door. "Happy to keep this open. Shall we say we close it on the fourteenth, and I will bring the two things that would change it?" You have turned an option into a decision with a delay, and taken the tab out of both your heads.
Is my gut really that unreliable?
On the calls you have made a hundred times with quick feedback, it is very reliable, and you should stop apologising for using it. On the calls you have made four times with feedback that arrived months later, its confidence is the same and its licence is not. The point is the sorting, not the distrust.
How is this different from the 4pm piece?
The 4pm piece is about the decisions you make when you are tired, and one of its three questions is how expensive it is to change your mind later. This piece is about the four things you do to make not-knowing stop, at any hour, and what each of them costs. The reversibility question appears in both because it matters in both; here it is about what an open option does to your working memory, there it is about whether to decide now.
Does the pre-mortem belong here?
Only for the decisions that cannot be undone and that you have not made before. It is the full process, and most decisions do not earn it. That was the whole argument of the risk register post.
Run a live decision through the return
Pick the decision you have been sitting on. Six questions; it tells you which line items you are paying and the move for each.
Where to start
Take the decision you have been avoiding this week and write one sentence: what would change my mind? Then set a date, no more than a week out, on which it closes. Gather only what the sentence names. On the date, decide, write the four before-lines, and diarise the review. That is the whole rebate, applied once. Count how much of the not-knowing was tax, and how much was the decision.
Being trusted with the calls that nobody has the answer to, and moving on them without either freezing or guessing, is one of the things the Connected Leader Assessment measures under Strategic Contribution. It is free, it takes about twelve minutes, and it will tell you whether people bring you decisions or bring you tasks.
And if you want to build the wider skill, running the process the decision has actually earned, spotting the risk everyone has filed as fine, and saying the thing nobody in the room has said, that is what our Skill Sprints are for. One topic, built properly, an hour or two, and you come out having made something rather than having been talked at.
Meg ✌️
Free tools
The tax return, the interactive tool in this post, free
The Decision Record, the download in this post, free
The Connected Leader Assessment, twelve minutes, free, with a read on Strategic Contribution, the dimension this post sits in
P.S. Want to Go Deeper on Deciding Under Uncertainty?
If this resonated and you want to go further, here is the evidence the piece is built on. These are the papers that shaped my thinking on why not-knowing feels the way it does, and on the four ways people pay to make it stop, and they are well worth your time.
Every DOI below has been checked. The 2025 draft cited a business magazine, an applied-psychology journal and a university by name without a paper behind any of them; none of those claims survived the check and none appear here. Where I could not confirm a figure from the paper itself, I have left the figure out rather than guess.
📃 de Berker, Rutledge, Mathys, Marshall and colleagues (2016) 45 people, a probabilistic shock task, and stress measured three ways. Subjective stress, pupil size and skin conductance all tracked irreducible uncertainty, which peaks at fifty-fifty, rather than the shock itself. https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms10996
📃 Tsai, Klayman and Hastie (2008) Three studies. Given more judgement-relevant information, confidence rose more than accuracy, and the gap widened. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.obhdp.2008.01.005
📃 Hall, Ariss and Todorov (2007) Four experiments predicting basketball games. Knowing the team names raised fans' confidence, lowered their accuracy, and cost them money in a real betting round. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.obhdp.2007.01.003
📃 Desender, Boldt and Yeung (2018) Preregistered. With accuracy held equal, low confidence alone drove people to seek more information. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797617744771
📃 Hartmann and Weißenberger (2023) The systematic review of information overload in professional judgement: accuracy falls past a threshold while time and the feeling of overload keep rising. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11301-023-00343-7
📃 Gilbert and Ebert (2002) Photography students who could change their minds about a print liked it less, did not predict that, and wanted the option anyway. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.82.4.503
📃 Bullens, van Harreveld and Förster (2011) Two experiments. Reversible decisions kept decision thoughts active, reduced working memory capacity, and produced more regret through that reduction. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2011.02.012
📃 Anderson (2003) The review of decision avoidance: deferral, status quo, omission and inaction inertia, driven mainly by anticipated regret and selection difficulty. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.129.1.139
📃 Han, Quadflieg and Ludwig (2023) Meta-analysis, 59 effects. Avoiding a decision did not reliably reduce regret; only keeping the status quo did; and avoiding again after a previous bad outcome increased it. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0292857
📃 Gilovich and Medvec (1995) The temporal pattern of regret: actions sting more in the short term, inactions in the long run. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295x.102.2.379
📃 Yeung and Feldman (2022) Preregistered replication, 988 people. Three of four original studies replicated with weaker effects; one did not. https://doi.org/10.1525/collabra.37122
📃 Kahneman and Klein (2009) The two sides of the intuition argument, jointly: intuition is trustworthy where the environment is regular and the person has had prolonged practice with feedback, and not otherwise. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0016755
📃 Baron and Hershey (1988) Five studies. The same decision on the same information was rated as better thinking when the outcome was good, by people who agreed outcomes should not count. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.54.4.569
📃 Aiyer, Kam, Ng, Young and colleagues (2023) Preregistered replication, 692 people. Outcome bias replicated with larger effects than the original, including among those who said outcomes should not matter. https://doi.org/10.5334/irsp.751
📃 Sacchi and Cherubini (2004) 91 practising doctors rated their own diagnoses higher after good outcomes and lower after bad ones, and misremembered the evidence accordingly. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2929.2004.01975.x
📃 Lefgren, Platt and Price (2015) Professional basketball coaches changed strategy more after losses than wins, including narrow, uninformative and expected losses. https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2014.1966
📃 Fischhoff (1975) Hindsight is not equal to foresight. Knowing the outcome makes it look more foreseeable than it was, and the before-knowledge cannot be recovered. https://doi.org/10.1037/0096-1523.1.3.288
📃 Eisenhardt (1989) Eight firms in a fast-moving industry. Fast decision-makers used more real-time information, more alternatives at once and a two-tier advice process, and performed better. https://doi.org/10.5465/256434
📃 Anseel, Lievens and Schollaert (2009) Two studies, 1,128 people. Reflection with feedback improved performance more than feedback alone; reflection without feedback did nothing. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.obhdp.2009.05.003
📃 Mitchell, Russo and Pennington (1989) The pre-mortem paper: imagining an outcome as certain, rather than merely possible, produced more and better reasons for it. The full process, for the decisions that earn it. https://doi.org/10.1002/bdm.3960020103
P.P.S. Why Do I Even Have the Nerve to Write This?
Fair question.
I am someone who has spent years working alongside remarkable executives, navigating chaos, translating vision into structure and figuring things out, sometimes beautifully and sometimes the very hard way. I have had the privilege of being the steady right hand to leaders who move fast, take risks and expect a lot. That environment has shaped me more than any classroom ever could.
I also happen to have an MBA, and I am studying psychology because people fascinate me. How we work. Why we disconnect. What actually holds us together when the pressure rises.
But really, none of that is the point.
I am here because I have lived the erosion and rebuilt from it. I have seen the cost of carrying too much and the relief that arrives when you finally stop disappearing inside your own competence.
So I share what I have learned in case it helps someone else. Take what is useful. Leave the rest. And remember this one truth that professionals like you often forget:
You are probably doing far better than you give yourself credit for.
Comments