Selling Certainty
Photo by Jan Genge on Unsplash
Everywhere you look right now, someone’s selling certainty.
Proprietary models. Fancy dashboards. New AI-driven tools. We’re surrounded by promises that the answer to predictably navigating our weird, turbulent world has finally arrived.
Certainty is the most seductive of promises. Not just in the research world, but in business at large.
But here’s the thing: Innovations that test well in BASES or Zappi fail all the time. Well-planned campaigns get derailed by loud minorities. And, it’s common practice in the innovation world to look for opportunity by rummaging through old ideas that wound up getting shelved, to resurrect them.
The promise of certainty has a mixed track record, at best.
I get why it’s such an object of desire in difficult times. Every week we hear about new rounds of layoffs. People are afraid of losing their jobs and they’re looking to make safe bets - not stick their necks out.
Research shows that we collectively make poor decisions in times like these because when people operate under threat, their decision-making shifts. And not in ways that serve innovation. We like known interventions, even when they’re less optimal. When brands and research teams feel pressure, they gravitate toward things that feel quick and sure.
But, speed and confidence aren’t the same as insight.
In our latest research on young people and their relationship with money we talked about cruel optimism: Our attachment to ideas that promise one thing, but ultimately keep us stuck. With money, it’s the increasingly unrealistic pursuit of the American dream, or home ownership. And in business, it’s the false hope of certainty and decision-making that looks certain.
There's a proverb that usually gets applied to the world of sport: You have to be good to be lucky. It applies equally in business. The world’s best athletes have a knack for executing when their back is up against the wall. Their practice and hard work builds capacity to thrive in any circumstance, whether things go as planned, or not.
That’s the game that winners play, whether you want to succeed in sport or strategy: Not controlling every variable, but building the capacity to move forward decisively even when things are uncertain or don’t go according to plan.
From Certainty to Capacity
There’s a Google Pixel ad running right now where a woman points her phone at a flower stand and asks Perplexity what flowers she should buy. It’s a classic example of big tech’s penchant for inventing solutions to problems that don’t exist. In real life, most people have the capacity to make mundane daily decisions independently without relying on a tech assist.
When we chase certainty, especially in the research and insights world, we often do the same thing: Hand our agency over to tools that promise ideal outcomes but quietly erode our ability to think and see for ourselves.
Capacity should be the goal here - The ability to stay oriented, creative, and decisive even when things are unstable.
And, capacity comes from habits of thinking.
Just like you’ll never become a good golfer who gets lucky by watching YouTube videos that promise you a magic fix, you won't build strategic capacity by outsourcing the human/thinking part of research to dashboards, platforms, and generative summaries.
Here’s four ways your team can protect their capacity:
Prioritize Good Questions Over Definitive Answers
When we ask better questions, we stretch understanding instead of shrinking it. Research offerings built around certainty deliberately push you toward binaries and cognitive closure. You escape the discomfort of “not knowing”, but you eliminate strategic possibilities.
Ask better questions, and suddenly these tools don’t seem far less helpful.
Instead of “Which concept tests best?”, ask “How do people decide between options like these?”
Instead of “Do people like this idea?”, ask “What’s getting in the way of them caring?”
Instead of “What’s our plan?”, ask “What possibilities do we need to be ready for?”
Separate Speed From Urgency
Rapid insights are en vogue. But speed is sometimes more performative than productive.
Research on decision quality shows that urgency isn’t a problem, but false urgency is. Studies from MIT’s Sloan School of Management (Kotter & Schlesinger, 2008 being the latest) have found that teams working under real urgency - a shared sense of purpose, not panic - make better decisions. Those running on speed for its own sake made shallower ones, relying on whatever information was easiest to access.
The practical move here is simple: Unless speed to insight is actually mission critical, build a deliberate pause into your process - even when you’re moving quickly. A moment to interpret and ask questions, not just sprint toward a definitive conclusion.
It's something that is easy to forget to do when the insights partner you're working with is all about quick-turn, definitive results. Doing this may also expose the lack of strategic depth your insights partner truly offers you.
Design For Range
We’ve been taught to treat precision as rigour. Tight forecasts, single-number estimates, clear answers. But in complex systems like markets or culture, precision creates a false sense of control. It's the opposite of rigour.
Political psychologist Philip Tetlock conducted a longitudinal study where he found that that the forecasters who were most certain were usually the least accurate. The best ones, in his 20-year study, were people who held multiple, competing hypotheses at once. Instead of focusing on being right, they focused on staying prepared.
Strategy works the same way.
Instead of hunting for the answer, map a few plausible ones. Precision is satisfying, but range is useful. It’s also what keeps you afloat when uncertainty inevitably arrives.
Abandon Forward Learning At Your Peril
The more tightly we try to prove value through short-term outcomes, the less we produce things that contribute to long-term advantage.
Organizational theorist (and dead-ringer for Santa Claus) Stafford Beer, in his Viable Systems Model, argued that any organization built only to optimize the present eventually collapses under its own efficiency. To stay alive, systems need a dedicated learning and future-looking function - a part of the organization that experiments, questions, and adapts faster than the environment shifts around it.
That’s what the best insights programs do. They don't just answer immediate business questions; they expand the organization’s ability to continuously ask better ones.
You can’t run a company on curiosity alone. But you also won’t be running one for long if you’ve forgotten how to be curious about the future.
A Lasting Advantage
The future will always belong to those who focus on building capacity instead of chasing certainty. The shiny tools, dashboards, and proprietary models sell the fantasy that complexity can be tamed, and that certainty can be manufactured.
But certainty can’t be automated, and prediction isn’t the same as preparedness.
Certainty might sell, but it’s fragile.
The kind of insights work that builds capacity might take a week or two more, and it might not come wrapped in a dashboard, but it will serve your organization better in the long run. Are you really going to trade long-term advantage just to save two weeks right now?
And selfishly, your Q4 use it or lose it budget is an ideal place to focus on these things.
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