DANGER! YOU ARE BECOMING CERTAIN

It was Peter Senge in his classic work, The Fifth Discipline (1990) who wrote these bold and challenging words: “Nothing undermines openness more surely than certainty. Once we feel as if we have ‘the answer,’ all motivation to question our thinking disappears.” (p. 281)

Wow! And given that openness is one of the very central components of creativity, and questioning our own thinking lies at the heart of mindfulness, reflexive thinking, and many other key leadership skills — being certain endangers lots of important human assets. This is not common knowledge and not obvious, and yet a very present danger to our well-being.

Yet, and here is the ironic paradox, we all want to know and to be certain. Don’t you? I certainly do. Generally this is our goal as human beings, we want to be certain about things. With certainty, we feel confident—another quality that most people highly value. So when it comes to aiming for the confidence of being certain, we have to be careful. Ginny Whitelaw in her book, The Zen Leader, wrote that the two words that encode certainty, “I know...” is one of the most self-limiting phrases (page 146).

• Okay, so do you still want to be certain?

• Do you want to close the door in your search for understanding and for knowing and be certain?

• Or are you good with staying open, to not knowing “for sure?”

Recently in working over the list of cognitive biases and cognitive fallacies, I summarized them in seven categories. The first category is the cognitive bias of assuming understanding. In so many things we all think that we know. And about the things that we don’t know, we assume that someone knows. Yet the truth is more than that in most things— no one has “the answer.” And every answer that we do have is at best an approximation and never the final answer.

When you therefore feel certain about something, which we all do from time to time, and tragically some people do all the time(!)— let that moment be a warning to begin questioning your certainty. Then every time you feel that you are right, that should set off the alarm system within. Instead of considering that a good thing, use it as a time to do a check. The seductive thing about being certain is that you experience it emotionally as “confidence.” Yet how many times that feeling tricked you?

Joseph Yeager in Thinking about Thinking with NLP (1985) wrote about the many times when we are seduced by the feeling of certainly. Commenting on that, he wrote—

“No doubt Hitler felt he was right when he thought up the ‘final solution.’ ... In the interpersonal sphere, people ‘feel’ they are entitled to opinions. Often that means they have the luxury of acting on phony facts without bothering to check them out.” (p. 91)

“The problem with the feeling of certainty is that it can be very deceiving. It is the basis for much prejudice ... prejudging something before the facts are in. ... When the seductiveness of the ‘certainty’ feeling guides your response, your brain is not being ‘user friendly,’ as Richard Bandler reminds us. As a result we have to learn how to tell good from bad information and the illogical ways we use our mental logic. Too bad for us that we don’t have an instinct for good quality information.” (p. 92)

Because the quality of the information we act upon is crucial, we need to do critical thinking. During previous times when people were certain and convinced of the rightness of their interpretations.

“They all had the courage of convictions. Since they operated on faith, they had no need to test their theory. That is one of the reasons that the dark ages lasted so long. The folks all believed they had reality all figured out and explained so they didn’t need to look for any other ways to consider the nature of things.” (1985, p. 93)

The bottom line? Certainty can be dangerous to your sanity, to your learning, to your growth as a person, to your effectiveness, and to your self-actualization. Most of the time it seduces you with good feelings so you stop thinking, questioning, checking and just go along with whatever.

Openness occurs between people when they are willing to suspend their own certainty in each other’s presence. When they do that, they can then share and let their thinking be influenced by each other. It is this willingness to be vulnerable to not knowing and not having the final answer enables us to have a real conversation. Here’s to being able to embrace uncertainty and to stay open to new information and perspectives that can expand our understanding and discoveries!