So. A few years ago, life was beautiful: green grass, a predictable world. You would open the dashboard and see metrics that helped you believe everything was under control. Nowadays you open the dashboard, and you believe nothing it shows.
If that describes you, congratulations…
You are now the average manager in 2026.
The data on this, ironically, is not bad.
PwC (yep, couldn't find anything from the Green Dot) surveyed 4,454 CEOs across 95 countries: only 30% are confident about future business prospects, the lowest reading in five years, nearly half of what it was in 2022.
The Conference Board (one of the oldest US think tanks) asked American CEOs to name their top threat, and 43% picked "uncertainty." The people with the best information in the world formally declared their top risk is not knowing things.
And my favourite. Vistage (CEO coaching advisory), explaining why Small and Medium enterprises' CEO confidence briefly rose late last year, wrote that confidence improved "not because macroeconomic conditions are stronger, but because uncertainty has become more familiar."
So uncertainty is everywhere.
And what's going on with the data?
They keep mutating.
Bots crossed 50% of all web traffic in June.
Roughly 74% of newly published web pages already contain AI-generated content.
Some statistics say that 81% of LinkedIn long-form posts are AI-generated… hehe.
The slop is entering the datasets, the commentary, the commentary on the commentary. And the machines producing it are famously sycophantic: ask for the bullish case, receive the bullish case; ask for the bearish case, receive it with equal conviction.
Give it a few years, a few more AI integration cases at the enterprise level, and without a newfound solution for upgraded critical thinking among the new generation of managers, we will be extremely lost.
So what does a manager do inside this fog of war?
Well, I don't know exactly, but I observe three strategies in the wild.
Three strategies for a manager stuck inside fog of slop & uncertainty
The Ostrich
Nothing is happening. The metrics work. The annual plan is sound, although it seems we need to remake it two months into the financial year. The dashboard is green, and the unusual noise outside is weather. The Ostrich is calm, happy, and will be the last to know. Which, in fairness, is a form of peace. I want to be the Ostrich desperately but can't… I blame my upbringing.
The Ultimate Nihilist
Everything is narrative anyway. Reality is a construct; things exist while people believe in them; therefore, stop measuring and start storytelling. Ride the chaos. Sell the vibe. The Nihilist is having a wonderful quarter and, I regret to inform you, is currently outperforming you. Most of Fomonomics is his work.
Professor X
Absorb everything. Every dataset, every signal, every feed, every take on every take. Process it all and either go mad (the likelier outcome) or become the one person who genuinely reads the patterns. The Professor X is exhausting to sit next to and occasionally, right.
Here is the thing: all three are rational responses to broken instruments. Denial, surrender, and omniscience are what humans do when the map stops matching the territory.
Now, the good thing is that this isn't some nonsense "who are you" test.
It's a reflection on WHY we behave this way. And of course, psychology has studied our three friends for decades.
But first: why does uncertainty hurt at all?
Neuroscientists now describe the brain as a prediction machine.
Its job is to predict the world, and it treats every gap between forecast and reality as an error to be punished.
In a famous 2016 University College London experiment, people who faced a 50% chance of an electric shock showed more stress than people who knew the shock was coming for certain.
Certain pain beats uncertain pain.
Your brain would rather have the bad news than the maybe.
Remember that next time you postpone the difficult conversation "to spare someone some pain".
Economists knew this before.
Risk is when you don't know the outcome but know the odds; uncertainty is when you don't even know the odds.
Every dashboard, model, and KPI ever built is risk-technology. Our current condition (phantom debt, K-shaped statistics, bots past the 50% line) is uncertainty. We are measuring a fog with a ruler.
Now probably most important for our burned-out brains is the fact that the damage to us and our psyche is never done by uncertainty itself. It is done by the way we try to deal with it. Chronic worry, over-planning, compulsive checking, one more report, one more dashboard, one more reassuring meeting: these are certainty-seeking behaviours, and each round teaches your brain that uncertainty was indeed unbearable, which is how the loop tightens.
Which brings us back to our three friends
The Ostrich is what clinicians call avoidance: certainty through not looking.
Professor X is hypervigilant monitoring, a compulsion.
And the Nihilist (this is my favourite) is not tolerating uncertainty at all. "Nothing means anything" is itself a totalising answer. Nihilism is counterfeit certainty.
And what do the clinicians actually prescribe? Not more certainty. Less. Few strategies from your friends from Meme Guide to Management below:
1. Behavioural experiments in tolerating the unknown
Build tolerance to uncertainty. Send the email without re-reading it, delegate without checking, make the small decision with incomplete information, and record what actually happened. The data almost always shows the catastrophe didn't come, and the feeling of unmanageability fades with exposure, exactly like any other exposure therapy.
2. Distinguish worry from problem-solving.
If the concern is actionable, act now; if it isn't, it's worry: a simulation of control, not control.
3. ACT, acceptance and commitment therapy
Stop fighting the feeling of uncertainty, make room for it, and steer by values instead of predictions. Commit to a direction precisely because outcomes can't be guaranteed, but it "feels right" because it's the right thing to do!
4. Probabilistic thinking over binary prediction
Philip Tetlock's superforecaster research from the University of Pennsylvania found the people who handle the future best aren't the most confident.
They're the ones comfortable saying "60/40," updating constantly, and treating every forecast as provisional. Certainty is negatively correlated with accuracy.
Uncertainty is here to stay.
And I truly believe the ability to handle it will be one of the defining characteristics of a truly successful manager in the coming years.
Talk soon,
Sultanbek
