Ambiguity Tolerance: A Key Skill Of Modern Man

“Geronimo ID’d … Geronomio EKIA.“

These are the relieving words that a group of 14 men and two women were waiting for in the Situation Room of the White House on the afternoon of May 1, 2011: Enemy killed in action. Behind the code name Geronimo hides Osama bin Laden, the mastermind of the September 11 attacks.

An iconic photograph goes around the world at the time: President Barack Obama and his security advisors huddle together in a tiny conference room and stare spellbound at a screen. They are watching live as men from the Navy SEAL special forces storm a compound in Pakistan. What might have been going through their minds at that moment? What thoughts, discussions and decisions preceded the event, what doubts and inner conflicts?

The CIA had reported a possible lead on bin Laden to the President some time previously but was unable to identify him beyond doubt. There was only a 60 to 80 percent probability that it was the wanted man. Other analysts put the figure at 40 to 60 percent. Not an easy situation. But Obama decided.

“I know we’re trying to quantify these factors as best as we can. But ultimately, this is a fifty-fifty call. Let’s move on.“

Why this story? It is intended to illustrate a key skill that is likely to become even more important for all of us in the future: Ambiguity tolerance.

Time for a mental update

Psychology talks about ambiguity in connection with a state of uncertainty, insecurity and doubt that we find unpleasant. We simply don't cope well with states of limbo, contradictions and ambiguity. This is why we tend to hastily take refuge in beliefs and supposed certainties. However, in an increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous world, this behavior resembles that of a child trying to hide by covering its eyes.

The acronym VUCA is often used to describe the modern world. It stands for Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity. In order to move forward in this world, we need to update our mental operating system. It is based on the insight that consistency is not a law of nature. That we do not know everything and cannot predict everything. That we cannot give simple answers to difficult questions. That it is worth questioning beliefs and allowing for doubt.

The writer F. Scott Fitzgerald got the point very well: In his view, it is a sign of first-rate intelligence if you can hold two opposed ideas in your mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.

2030: How do we want to live?

Ambiguity tolerance means facing the VUCA world with an open mind. As a basic attitude, it enables us to keep a clear view, remain calm, deal productively with doubts, accept conflicting value judgments, and weigh them up constructively. And in this way also create a future worth living.

By 2030, one of the big questions will be how we want to shape our society and our everyday lives in an increasingly technologized world in which artificial intelligence (AI), modern genetic engineering and brain-computer interfaces will enable humans to literally outgrow themselves. Or in the words of Yuval Noah Harari, to evolve from homo sapiens to homo deus.

How do we make use of this potential and at the same time protect our individual rights to freedom, security, and self-determination? How do we reconcile progress with the demands of a fair, open and democratic society?

And how do we deal with the fact that other countries have different values, social beliefs, and political systems? Countries with which we are competing for economic, technological, geopolitical, military and "moral" dominance. At the same time, however, we must also cooperate with them in order to make the best possible use of the world's knowledge for scientific and technological progress and to tackle global challenges such as climate change, combating poverty and securing peace together.

Let's face it

Back to Obama. He didn't make it easy for himself back then. We can only guess at his inner struggle, his doubts. Nevertheless, he remained capable of acting. Fortunately, very few people find themselves in such extreme situations as a terrorist hunt. And yet this drastic example contains some interesting lessons.

This is because all of us—in our private and professional lives, but also as a society as a whole—are constantly having to make decisions under uncertainty, cannot be sure of the consequences of our decisions and are exposed to conflicting value judgments. These judgments differ between people, cultures, regions, and generations. And they are often subject to change over time.

Obama was not only exposed to the uncertainty that the target was not actually bin Laden. He was also faced with many other questions. Is the killing of a terrorist morally justifiable? Could there be innocent victims—and is that acceptable? What danger does the operation pose to his own people? Are retaliatory actions and an endless spiral of violence to be feared? What political consequences will the action have?

The drama in the White House reaches a climax when the final debate on the mission in Pakistan is due to take place among advisors. CIA chief Leon Panetta and two other security advisors are in favor; Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is torn, but ultimately also supports it ("it's a 51—49 call"); Vice President Joe Biden and Defense Secretary Robert Gates, on the other hand, advise against the action.

The remarkable thing about this decision-making situation is not just the dilemma Obama is facing given these conflicting recommendations from his closest advisors. It is at least as interesting that he has created an atmosphere of open exchange around him in which dissenting opinions are not just grudgingly accepted or even sanctioned. On the contrary: there is a method to dissent. According to Obama, Vice President Biden in particular has repeatedly challenged prevailing opinions on every important decision during his time in office—"often in the interest of giving me the space I needed for my own internal deliberations."

Keeping a clear view

Creating such an open environment is also important for other reasons. Especially in stressful situations, we tend to follow our intuitions too quickly. And in doing so, we fall prey to cognitive errors. Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman points out this danger in his bestseller "Thinking, Fast and Slow". His advice: surround yourself with observers. It is often much easier for outsiders to recognize that you are walking into a minefield than you are. Observers are usually also less stressed than decision-makers and are more open to new information.

Moods, which are known to fluctuate greatly, also affect the quality of decisions. We are not always the same person, Kahneman, Olivier Sibony and Cass Sunstein state elsewhere. In order to reduce "noise" in decisions, they recommend obtaining independent judgments from several assessors. Independence could be achieved above all by recording the judgments before the discussion to prevent opinions from influencing each other.

Because the US President can hardly optimize the result viewed from the end due to the many imponderables, he concentrates on the decision-making process. At the beginning, there is a clearly formulated goal and an instruction for action that ensures commitment ("I want to see a formal plan for how we're going to find him. I want a report on my desk every thirty days describing our progress.").

As soon as sufficient information is available, options are developed and discussed from various perspectives to gradually narrow down the decision-making corridor ("every meeting [...] had helped confirm my instincts"). At a certain point, Obama lets go and trusts that other people will also do a good job while implementing the decision ("I trusted that the SEALs would find a safe way out [...], even if some of our calculations and assumptions proved to be incorrect.").

The decision he has to make at the end is a difficult one. And a lonely one. But he is prepared to make it. He has carefully weighed up the opportunities and risks and sought advice. Wrong decisions and difficult situations in the past were the best training for this critical moment, as he described it in retrospect.

Perhaps he was thinking of Robert F. Kennedy, whose diary contains the appropriate saying, according to which good judgement is usually the result of experience; and experience is often the result of bad judgement.

"And while I couldn't guarantee the outcome of my decision, I was fully prepared and fully confident making it."

Keep calm

Doubting requires mental effort, full attention and above all: time. Kahneman therefore speaks of "slow thinking". In this context, the philosopher Nassim Nicholas Taleb even rehabilitates procrastination, i.e. putting off a decision or activity, as people are simply bad at filtering information in the short term.

The reluctance we feel when faced with unpleasant decisions or tasks is a completely natural instinct and defense mechanism. We should let it work and consciously make use of it.

Procrastination protects us from the temptation to react frantically to all kinds of short-term information. Procrastination allows us to let certain developments take their course. This gives the hyperactives among us in particular the chance to change their minds before making irrevocable decisions.

And what else characterizes top decision-makers? They are actively self-questioning. This is perhaps one of the most important findings of Kahneman and his colleagues.

Modern man doubts—and that's a good thing

Let's look further into the future. An increasingly pressing question concerns the use of autonomous weapon systems. AI expert and best-selling author Kai-Fu Lee fears: "The deployment of autonomous weapons will be accelerated by an inevitable arms race that will lack the natural deterrence of nuclear weapons. Autonomous weapons are the AI application that most clearly and deeply conflicts with our morals and threatens humanity's continuity."

Experts and decision-makers have a duty to weigh up all possible solutions very carefully and avert this danger at an early stage. Kai-Fu Lee also speculates about an agreement that could possibly be concluded by 2041 ("AI 2041" is the title of one of his books): What if the international community pledged to fight future wars exclusively with robots, to rule out human casualties from the outset? "These notions are clearly not practical today, but perhaps they will inspire something more feasible sooner."

2030 would not be a bad time for this.

It's all a question of training

Ambiguity tolerance is one of the key skills of modern man. Not only to make better decisions. But also to be immune to the dangers of ambiguity intolerance. Swiss psychoanalyst Mario Gmür, for example, warns that exaggerated convictions can make you ill: Depression, schizophrenia, delusion, sectarian addiction—the list of diseases of conviction is long. The "inability to doubt" is also a social evil because it encourages extremism and terrorism.

Islamic scholar Thomas Bauer thinks in a similar way, considering the prevailing urge to "disambiguate” the world to be one of the causes of the much-lamented "division of society". Accepting the discrepancy between our own wishes, ideals and convictions and those of our fellow human beings—in other words, ambiguity tolerance in the best sense—is the only way to overcome this division.

The good news is that ambiguity tolerance can be trained. Gmür advises more childlike wonder: "Doubt [...] has its origins in wonder, a relaxed, non-judgmental curiosity whose task it is to perceive everything as impartially as possible." It irritates our taken-for-granted ways of seeing and living and thus protects us from the danger of falling for purely illusory solutions out of sheer longing for certainty.

Bauer recommends a serious and respectful engagement with art, religion, science, politics, and nature. After all, all these fields are characterized by a high degree of ambiguity. "Only if [they] are cultivated seriously can a world of multiple meanings flourish, a world in which ambiguity is perceived as an enrichment and not a flaw."

Philosophy can also serve as a practical guide to life. Bertrand Russell, the most important British philosopher of the 20th century, saw its greatest value precisely in this:

“To teach how to live without certainty, and yet without being paralysed by hesitation, is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy, in our age, can still do for those who study it.“

So let's learn to doubt, and still remain capable of acting. And let us appreciate ambiguity tolerance for what it is: a key skill of modern man.

The original German version of this article was first published in February 2023 in the book Next.2030, edited by Ann-Kristin Achleitner and Hagen Rickmann , and on Der Debatte halber.