Released On 04 May 2026
Steph's blog: The Absurdity Of Certainty
Why the best decisions are not always the ones with clear answers.
“Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd,” wrote Voltaire — a line that feels uncomfortably accurate when you realise that some of the most important decisions you’ll make come with neither clarity nor confidence. Over the past few years, I’ve had to make a number of those decisions, some more consequential than most. It has struck me that decisions tend to feel most critical when clarity is in short supply — which is an inconvenient design feature.
Some decisions are straightforward — see oncoming traffic, wait to cross the road. Others are less so. Deciding which candidate to hire, for example, often comes down to a handful of interviews, a task, and a degree of optimism. You make a call, fully aware that you won’t know if it was the right one until much later.
We tend to believe that good decisions come from gathering enough information, analysing it properly, and arriving at the correct answer. In most professional settings, this belief is reinforced with brainstorming, spreadsheets, slide decks, and the occasional “data-led” discussion. But when the information is incomplete, ambiguous, or simply not there, analysis doesn’t remove uncertainty; it just makes you more aware of it.
In my case, that reality became unavoidable when faced with a decision about whether my daughter should undergo a lung transplant — a choice involving uncertain survival rates, unknown quality of life, and no clear “right” answer. The difficulty wasn’t just the stakes; it was the absence of certainty. No amount of research or expert opinion could eliminate the fact that we were making a decision we could never fully validate.
In situations like this, doing nothing can feel like the safer option. After all, as long as you don’t decide, you can’t be wrong. It becomes something that just ‘happened’. In practice, though, deferring the decision usually means letting circumstances decide for you — often under greater pressure and with fewer options.
What I’ve come to understand is that good decision-making has less to do with certainty than we’d like to believe. A good decision is not one that guarantees a good outcome, but one that is reasonable given the information available at the time. The outcome may still be unfavourable, but that doesn’t make the decision wrong.
That distinction matters beyond life-or-death situations. In work and in life, we are routinely asked to make decisions with incomplete information — who to hire, when to act, which strategy to back — and then judged with the benefit of hindsight. It’s tempting to equate the outcome with the quality of decision-making, but the two are not the same.
Voltaire was right: certainty is largely an illusion. The task is not to eliminate doubt, but to act in spite of it — and to accept that sometimes, the best decision you can make is simply a defensible one.
Steph juggles a full time job in sustainable finance, 2 wonderful daughters aged 6 and 3 (the younger one is disabled and has a genetic lung disease), and a supportive husband. She lives in south London and works in the City.
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