We make thousands of decisions every day, convinced that we make them rationally. Daniel Kahneman, winner of the 2002 Nobel Prize in economics and who passed away in 2024, spent his life proving the opposite.
Our brain is not a logical machine. It is a shortcut machine, formidably efficient in a stable world, and formidably treacherous as soon as uncertainty rises.
And today, uncertainty only keeps rising.
What Kahneman revealed about our brain
His great contribution comes down to two systems of thought. System 1 is fast, intuitive, automatic. System 2 is slow, analytical, energy hungry, and deeply lazy. Most of the time, System 1 decides for us, without our even noticing.
The problem is that this System 1 runs on biases. We are systematically overconfident in our predictions, what Kahneman called the illusion of validity. We hate losing twice as much as we love winning, which makes us cling to the past. And we prefer a coherent story to a true one.
Faced with uncertainty, our brain almost always chooses a reassuring false certainty over an uncomfortable real uncertainty.
The trap closes: the world has genuinely become more uncertain
You might think it would be enough to correct these biases. Except that a second problem is added to the first. The world itself has genuinely changed. Acceleration, interconnection, nonlinear effects where small causes produce large consequences, tipping points where everything shifts. The map our brain patiently built from a stable world no longer matches the territory.
So here we are with a double constraint: a brain wired for a predictable world, and a world that is no longer predictable.
Why trying to predict everything no longer works
This is where Kahneman’s psychology and chaos theory say exactly the same thing. Kahneman showed that experts, in complex domains, predict barely better than chance. Chaos theory goes even further: sensitivity to initial conditions makes detailed long-term prediction simply impossible, not for lack of data, but by its very nature.
In other words, the strategy of predicting everything in order to control everything loses on both counts.
Our brain is not capable of it, and the world does not allow it.
Deciding differently: Direction plus Repetition
The good news is that there is another way to decide, one that depends neither on a perfect brain nor on a predictable world. It comes down to two movements.
Set a direction rather than a detailed plan. This is the principle of the strange attractor: you give a clear heading, and you let the path adapt to reality.
Move forward through small, repeated, reversible actions. These are exponential routines. British Cycling did not revolutionize the sport with a single stroke of genius: it stacked hundreds of tiny improvements that, repeated, ended up changing everything.
In concrete terms, three decision tools follow. First, distinguish reversible from irreversible decisions: for a reversible decision, decide fast, your System 1 is enough; for an irreversible decision, deliberately slow down and call on your System 2. Next, under high uncertainty, prefer small reversible bets to large definitive ones. Finally, accept that you cannot know everything: decide as you go, and adjust with feedback from reality.
Kahneman taught us a form of humility: our brain is not built for this uncertain world. Chaos theory adds a piece of good news: this uncertain world has hidden patterns, and we can use them. Chaos is not a mess. We have never had so little control, yet we have never had so much power to influence things.
Bruno Marion is an expert in chaos theory applied to leadership and management. An international bilingual English-French keynote speaker, he works with executives and organizations in more than 40 countries. He is the author of Chaos, A User’s Guide and Not Everyone Will End Up with an Axe in the Forest.
