How to Turn Doubt and Uncertainty Into Opportunities Instead of Threats

Doubt is pervasive. So, too, is our reluctance to tackle it head-on, according to research and insights revealed in a new book by Bobby Parmar, professor of business administration at the University of Virginia Darden School of Business.

By running away from uncomfortable moments of doubt and uncertainty, we pay a price in our personal and professional lives. Organizations suffer unnecessarily as problems persist instead of being thoughtfully resolved. Individually, we miss opportunities to grow and build stronger relationships when our response to an uncertain situation is to head in the other direction.

It doesn’t have to be this way, Parmar suggests in Radical Doubt: Turning Uncertainty Into Surefire Success, released this summer.

“Doubt can be an opportunity, rather than a threat,” Parmar said. “We can all get better at working through doubt and uncertainty. I wrote this book hoping to inspire people and give them the confidence – and a toolkit – for improving their ability to make the most of moments of doubt.”

Parmar recently sat down to talk about Radical Doubt with the Darden Report. An edited transcript follows:

How is Radical Doubt different from other books about decision-making?

Most decision-making books try to get the reader to act like a machine. This is a decision-making book that tries to help you unleash your human talents and skills. That means trying to understand multiple conflicting goals rather than trying to optimize a single goal, dealing with both quantitative and qualitative information instead of trying to get human beings to act like a robot and only deal with information that you can quantify. Your values, your beliefs, your perceptions, all of those are deeply human things that are sometimes discounted in traditional decision-making books. Finally, I hope that it’s a thought-provoking and fun read.

Where’d you get the idea for this book and topic?

This is my 18th year at Darden, and I’ve taught leadership, innovation and design thinking, and business ethics. I’ve noticed that my students are really good at the technical problems, but they struggle with more complex decisions with multiple competing criteria and multiple interpretations. That got me really interested in how to help them.

And you’ve seen similar trends among organizational leaders and executives outside of the classroom?

I found that they can lack the skills for making these difficult decisions, but they need those skills because the more they move up in an organization, the more they have to deal with problems that cut across finance and accounting and operations and strategy where there isn’t a simple, clear answer. There’s demand for people who are good at addressing these moments of doubt and a clear gap in the fact that there isn’t curriculum or research on how to do it.

Who should read Radical Doubt?

I think about the target audience as a series of concentric circles. In the inner-most circle are leaders in organizations promoted into positions where they find themselves having to make difficult choices and finding that the traditional tools just don’t work. The second circle is readers interested in a research-backed framework for making more effective decisions and developing themselves. And then finally, all of us wrestle with doubt and uncertainty. So even if you’re not a business leader there are hopefully a few things in this book that you would find helpful in your personal life.

You write that “the goal is to proceed wisely by training you to experience doubt as a catalyst for learning.” Could you explain?

When we experience doubt, it’s because we have these conflicting perspectives about what we see in front of us and what we should do. Most of us experience doubt as a weakness, not as a signal for getting more curious or a signal for starting to learn more effectively. The book tries to make the case and to provide opportunities for the reader to experience the feeling of these multiple conflicting interpretations. Typically, because we associate the experience of doubt with feeling inferior or feeling weak, we give up too early in our decision-making process. We don’t frame the problem effectively. We don’t spend enough time generating alternatives or testing potential alternatives to learn about what would be effective. All kinds of counterproductive things happen when we experience doubt as a red flag rather than a green flag.

How do you define doubt?

I try to highlight a more psychological definition of doubt, which is multiple conflicting interpretations of what I see, and therefore it’s harder for me to know what it is and how I move forward. Doubt is pervasive. There are times in our life where there’s a lot of change. There are situations that go through a lot of upheaval where we don’t know which way is up.

What do you mean when you suggest that we can get better at dealing with doubt?

When you’re doing a set of bicep curls or squats at the gym, the first couple of reps feel great, but you’re not actually getting any stronger. You’re just warming up. By rep eight and by rep nine, it hurts. It’s uncomfortable, but those are the reps where we’re actually building strength. And when we see doubt as, ‘Yeah, I might be uncomfortable, but this is the part where I’m actually improving the way I think about something. This is the part where I’m learning something new,’ then it’s easier to lean into it rather than running from it.

You explore and explain in detail how people make decisions and how their brain works. Why was it important to lay that foundation?

I wanted to talk about the neuroscience and the psychology of doubt is because a lot of myths get in the way of helping people learn from moments of doubt. One of those myths is that our personality determines our choices. The typical view is that a personality assessment will tell you if you’re introverted or extroverted, open to new experiences or closed to new experiences, and that determines what we choose when we encounter difficult decisions. People overestimate the degree to which those assessments predict their actual choices. So getting into the psychology and the neuroscience helps the readers understand where doubt comes from and therefore react to doubt more effectively.

Is this a psychology book, philosophy book or business book?

All of the above. Doubt is a human experience, and it requires an interdisciplinary approach to really bring insights from different research-streams together to understand how we can make the best use of it and where there are pitfalls. My research sits at the intersection of business and psychology and philosophy, so those were the traditions that I found myself drawing from.

What’s the cost of intentionally avoiding uncertainty and doubt?

You forgo the opportunity of improving the way that you think about the world. You rely on incomplete assumptions and beliefs to navigate the world, so you might end up wasting time and money and making decisions that you regret because they’re much more reactive.

How might this book apply to people thinking about their careers and life choices?

Learning doesn’t stop when you leave Darden or any higher education institution. You have ideas and assumptions and beliefs, but all of those have to be tested and improved over time. This book sets up a process of continuous learning that is useful at any stage, particularly these moments of big change in your life – a new job or switching a career or retirement. To keep this learning mindset is a very difficult thing to do, particularly under conditions of stress.

You describe research showing that when people knew they had to explain their reasoning and thinking around people whose opinions and views they valued, they were more careful. That feels like a Darden classroom case study.

I get to see students struggle, make great decisions, defend decisions in front of their classmates, and it takes some practice to get students to really hold their intuition as a hypothesis rather than as a decision. At its best, case method allows students to share what they’re thinking, be open to what other people are thinking, give reasons and engage with doubt more effectively. It’s important to give students the experience of demonstrating some humility, being open to changing our answers and giving high quality reasons for our beliefs.

The book highlights something often associated with social media as a factor in making people less likely to work through doubt. You call it the “addiction to feeling right.”

So much of our digital environment as well as an increasing amount of our real-world environment is built around confirming our existing beliefs. It feels good when someone confirms something you already believe, and many platforms have figured out the way to keep your eyeballs glued to the screen is to show you things that you already agree with. All of this confirmation makes feeling uncertain in your beliefs a lot harder and more painful. It sends a signal that maybe doubt is something that we should run from, preventing us from really engaging doubt effectively.

The book suggests writing out “recommendations” on how one might proceed through a doubt-filled situation.

A recommendation is really a synthesis of what you believe about the current context, what you think you should do, and what you might learn, and how you might change course based on what you learn. Here’s the situation we think we’re facing. Here’s what we think we should do. Here’s why. With a clearly articulated recommendation, you can communicate to others in a business setting more effectively, and you can improve it together. In personal decision making, we just take all of that for granted. If you were able to turn to a friend or a partner, a family member, and say, here’s how I’m thinking about things, and they could help you make it better, think about how much that would improve our decisions.

What about the opposite scenario, where someone might be very experienced and feel few doubts, overly confident about what they encounter?

Where people get into trouble – both novices and experts – is when they treat their intuition as the end of their decision. Your intuition is telling you some important things, but it’s never giving you the full picture. Learning to treat your intuition as a hypothesis can keep you open to learning.

How can a leader in an organization help their teams in the workplace?

The first is just to be really careful to reward effort and learning versus only rewarding outcomes. Setting the expectation that we’re all going to grow and get better is important. Giving them some grace when they stumble is important.

The second thing is making sure that there are systems in place that promote learning. Before launching a product or a new process improvement or a change initiative, have a structured pre-mortem where we think about ahead of time, what are all the things that could go wrong? Then use that to improve plans. Conduct postmortems. What did we learn? What are we going to do differently next time? Finally, doubt is a lot scarier when our choices are irreversible, when we’re taking big risks. For leaders to find small ways, experiments, small bets, so people can learn with minimal investment and minimal cost, that makes doubt a lot easier to deal with.

Your sense of humor shines through the entire book. Did you test jokes with your family or others?

My wife read a version, as did several close confidants, doctoral students, and friends. I got a lot of feedback and there were a lot of jokes cut. I think there are probably more jokes cut than actually made it into the book, so I learned how hard it is to actually be effectively funny.

Did researching and writing this book change how you approach your own situations involving doubt and uncertainty?

Yes, it did. Being forced to articulate some of these tools and techniques and synthesize the research helped give me more confidence in the face of doubt. Instead of thinking about your tolerance for uncertainty as a fixed trait that some people have and other people don’t, it really reinforced this idea that people can get better.