Brain Food: Tentative Uncertainty

Winston Churchill set up a special department. Others might be in awe of his titanic persona, but the job of this department, Jim Collins reports, was to give Churchill all the worst news. Then Churchill could sleep well at night, knowing he had not been groupthinked into a false sense of security.

hoping that some additional bit of information will tip the scale. If this works, they will arrive at a decision, but if it doesn’t, they will go into the continuous loop known as “analysis paralysis.” Either way, delaying the decision serves to buffer them somewhat from their fear of making a mistake.

This gives you some real decision-making power: It tells you about the limits of what you know and the limits of what you should attempt. It tells you, in an imprecise but useful way, a lot about how smart or stupid your decisions were regardless of the actual outcome. It makes you aware of your process, so that even if the results are good, you ca