How can I make better decisions when facing uncertainty?

Why better decisions start before the decision

When facing uncertainty, a natural instinct can be to simplify, reducing complex situations to binary choices or sorting them into neat categories. A trialectic asks us to do the opposite: hold three distinct aspects of a situation in active tension rather than collapsing a complex reality into a premature conclusion. Inspired by a morning workshop with Dave Snowden, hosted by Mannaz, and a post by The Cynefin Company on Estuarine Mapping, I’ve been exploring how the three specific trialectics apply directly to leadership: salience, sapience, and sentience; explicit, tacit, and entangled knowledge; and deduction, induction, and abduction.

When something important is happening, particularly when the situation is uncertain, unfamiliar, or changing quickly, there is intense pressure on a senior leader to reach a rapid interpretation. What is going on? Why is it happening? Who or what is causing it? What should we do?

Experience makes us good at answering those questions quickly, but speed can also become a weakness. We notice some things and not others, interpret what we see through previous experience, privilege particular forms of knowledge and construct an explanation that feels sufficiently convincing to act upon. Before long, something is happening has become I know what is happening.

Better decision-making under uncertainty therefore begins before we choose between options. It begins with examining how we are noticing, knowing and reasoning about the situation in the first place.

This also makes the ideas complementary to the Cynefin framework. Cynefin can help us consider the nature of the situation we are facing and how we might respond accordingly (In its latest form it is also a Trialectic). These trialectics invite another question: how might the way I am perceiving, knowing and reasoning be shaping what I think the situation is?

3 Trialectics to Break Strategic Blind Spots

Salience, sapience and sentience: How am I perceiving the situation?

Salience is concerned with what attracts and focuses our attention. In any situation, some things move into the foreground while others disappear into the background. A missed target, an angry customer, a sudden resignation or a worrying number on a dashboard can rapidly become salient. That does not mean it is unimportant; it means we need to recognise that attention is selective. What becomes salient may be influenced by urgency, emotion, organisational politics, what can easily be measured, what others are talking about or simply what we expected to find. The leadership question is therefore not just what am I noticing?, but why is this attracting my attention, and what might that attention be preventing me from noticing?

Sapience brings experience, judgement and practical wisdom into the picture. Senior leaders have usually accumulated a substantial repertoire of situations, patterns and lessons from which to draw, and that experience can be extraordinarily useful. You can sometimes see in minutes what someone less experienced might take days to recognise. The difficulty is that experience can also make novelty look familiar. A situation resembles something we have encountered before, so we unconsciously complete the pattern and begin acting as though the two situations are the same. Sapience is therefore not about distrusting experience, but about using it while remaining curious about its limits: what does my experience tell me, and where might my experience be causing me to see what I expect to see?

Sentience adds something easily neglected in organisational decision-making: We are feeling participants in the situations we are trying to understand. I am not standing outside the organisation observing it objectively. I may be anxious about the consequences of a decision, irritated by someone’s behaviour, excited by an opportunity, defensive about something I helped create or simply tired of dealing with the issue. Other people are experiencing the same situation too, sometimes very differently. Those feelings are not facts and should not automatically determine what we do, but neither are they irrelevant noise. They are part of what is happening. Asking what I am experiencing, how that might be shaping my judgement and how others are experiencing the situation differently can reveal aspects of a situation that more detached analysis misses.

Held together, these three perspectives encourage me to examine what has my attention, what my experience is telling me and what I and others are experiencing. None gives me the answer. The value lies partly in what happens when they do not neatly agree.

Explicit, tacit and entangled: Where does the knowledge reside?

Organisations tend to have a strong preference for explicit knowledge because it can be captured, stored, compared and moved around. Reports, dashboards, procedures, survey results, research, customer data, financial information and written plans all matter. When facing uncertainty, one sensible leadership response is therefore to ask what relevant knowledge is already available and where it can be found. But the presence of more explicit information does not necessarily mean that the situation will become understandable. A dashboard may tell me that performance has deteriorated without telling me what working in that part of the organisation has become like.

Some knowledge is tacit. People know things through practice and experience that they may struggle to turn into a procedure or presentation. An experienced engineer may sense that something is wrong before being able to explain precisely why. A salesperson may know that a customer relationship has subtly changed. A team leader may have learnt how work actually gets done despite the official process saying something rather different. Accessing tacit knowledge therefore requires more than asking people to send us their findings. It may involve conversation, observation, stories, demonstration or spending time working alongside people. It also means paying attention to people whose knowledge comes from proximity to the work rather than organisational status.

Snowden’s third form, entangled or emplaced knowledge, takes this further. Some knowledge cannot meaningfully be separated from the relationships, tools, practices, histories and local circumstances through which it exists. It is not simply sitting inside someone’s head waiting for us to extract it. If I want to understand why a team works in a particular way, why customers behave differently in one market, or why a change that looked straightforward on paper is producing unexpected consequences, I may have to engage with the context in which those things are happening. From a leadership perspective, this raises an uncomfortable question: where am I trying to understand from a distance something that can only really be understood through participation?

A useful shorthand is therefore: What can I find? Who can I learn from? What do I need to engage with? It prevents “we need more data” from becoming the automatic response to uncertainty.

Deduction, induction and abduction: How am I reasoning?

The third trialectic concerns the way we construct explanations. Deduction allows us to apply established knowledge or relationships to a particular situation. Where conditions are sufficiently stable and the relationship is reliable, this is enormously valuable. If we genuinely know that certain conditions produce certain outcomes, there is little virtue in pretending everything is mysterious or complex. The important leadership question is whether the conditions that made the relationship reliable elsewhere actually hold here.

Induction works from observations towards patterns. We notice that something has happened repeatedly, compare it with previous experience or examine a collection of cases and infer that there may be a meaningful pattern. Much organisational learning works this way. Again, it is useful, but similarity can seduce us. A pattern drawn from yesterday’s environment may not continue tomorrow, and a small number of similar-looking events may not constitute the pattern we think they do. The question becomes not simply what pattern can I see?, but where does this situation differ from the situations on which that pattern is based?

Abduction becomes particularly valuable when novelty is high and evidence incomplete. Rather than asking what must be true or what has usually been true, we ask what could plausibly explain what we are seeing. That means keeping several possible explanations alive rather than racing to identify the right one. Falling sales might reflect price, changing customer needs, competitor behaviour, a relationship problem, implementation difficulties, a change in the market or several interacting factors. The purpose is not to generate an enormous list of hypotheses and debate them indefinitely. It is to create enough plausible alternatives that we can begin looking for ways to distinguish between them, perhaps through observation, small probes or experiments.

Deduction, induction and abduction are not a hierarchy in which one is sophisticated and the others simplistic. They are complementary forms of reasoning. The challenge for leaders is recognising when established knowledge can reliably be applied, when patterns provide useful guidance and when uncertainty requires us to keep several plausible explanations open for longer.

Using the perspectives in everyday leadership

For a senior leader, the value of these ideas is not in remembering nine new terms, but in using the relationships between them to disrupt how we make sense of difficult situations. We naturally filter what we notice, draw on experience, favour particular sources of knowledge and reach for explanations that feel plausible. Usually that serves us well; sometimes it closes down possibilities too quickly. The questions below are not a checklist or diagnostic tool. They prompt exploration of the tensions between different ways of noticing, knowing, and reasoning when a situation is uncertain or complex.

Salience — what is attracting my attention?

1. What am I paying most attention to right now?
2. Why might these particular things be attracting my attention?
3. What might I be overlooking because my attention is elsewhere?

Sapience — what does my experience tell me?

1. What does my experience and judgement suggest is happening?
2. What previous situations am I drawing upon to reach that judgement?
3. Where might my experience help me see something and where might it make something novel appear familiar?

Sentience — what am I experiencing?

1. What am I feeling or experiencing as I engage with this situation?
2. How might that be influencing what I notice, believe or want to do?
3. How are others experiencing the situation differently, and what might those differences reveal?

Explicit — what can I find?

1. What relevant knowledge, evidence or information is already documented or captured?
2. Where can I access it, and what additional explicit information might I reasonably obtain?
3. What might the available reports, data or documentation be unable to tell me?

Tacit — who can I learn from?

1. Who has relevant experience or practical knowledge of this situation?
2. How might I access what they know through conversation, observation, stories or working alongside them?
3. Whose experience might I be overlooking because they lack formal authority, status or recognised expertise?

Entangled — what do I need to engage with?

1. What might only become understandable by getting closer to the situation itself?
2. Which relationships, practices, histories, tools or local circumstances might be shaping what is happening?
3. Where am I trying to understand from a distance something that can only really be understood through participation?

Deduction — what can I reliably apply?

1. What established knowledge, rules or causal relationships might apply here?
2. How confident am I that the conditions that made them reliable elsewhere also exist here?
3. What would I expect to see if my current explanation were wrong?

Induction — what patterns can I learn from?

1. What patterns can I see across what is happening now or what has happened previously?
2. Where does the current situation resemble previous situations and where does it differ?
3. Am I seeing a meaningful pattern, or imposing one because it gives me a reassuringly familiar explanation?

Abduction — what else could plausibly be happening?

1. What are several different plausible explanations for what I am seeing?
2. What surprising or apparently unrelated factors might be worth connecting or exploring?
3. What small probe, observation or experiment could help me learn which explanations deserve further attention?

The intention is not to answer all 27 questions every time you face an important decision. Sometimes a single question may be enough to unsettle an assumption. If I notice myself saying, “I’ve seen this before”, the sapience questions might be useful. If everyone in the senior team is discussing the same dashboard, I might explore what tacit or entangled knowledge is absent. If a confident explanation has emerged surprisingly quickly, I might deliberately generate two or three plausible alternatives. The questions are useful precisely because they interrupt certainty rather than provide another route towards it.

Using the perspectives with others during change

The same perspectives become useful differently when leading change. People in different parts of an organisation notice different things, possess different forms of knowledge and experience the same change differently. Rather than trying to combine these into a single agreed interpretation, a leader can convene conversations in which those differences become visible and useful. The questions below can help surface contrasting perspectives, bring less visible knowledge into the conversation and prevent a group from converging prematurely on one explanation. The aim is not consensus, but greater diversity of perspective from which possibilities for action can emerge.

Salience — what are we paying attention to?

1. What seems to be receiving most of our attention at the moment?
2. What are different people or groups noticing that others are not?
3. What might be happening outside the areas to which our attention is currently drawn?

Sapience — what is our experience telling us?

1. What previous experiences are shaping the different ways we are interpreting this situation?
2. Where do those experiences lead us towards different conclusions?
3. What might be genuinely different this time that our previous experience does not prepare us for?

Sentience — how are we experiencing the change?

1. How are different people and groups experiencing what is happening?
2. What are we, as leaders, experiencing ourselves, and how might that be influencing our actions?
3. What might differences in those experiences tell us that formal measures of the change cannot?

Explicit — what knowledge is already available?

1. What relevant information, evidence or knowledge has already been captured?
2. What does it tell us, and what does it not tell us?
3. What additional explicit information would genuinely help us rather than simply make us feel better informed?

Tacit — whose experience do we need?

1. Who is close enough to the work to know things that may not appear in our formal information?
2. Whose practical experience is currently absent from this conversation?
3. How can we engage with that experience without forcing people to translate everything they know into reports and presentations?

Entangled — where do we need to get closer?

1. What might we only understand by engaging directly with the places, relationships and practices affected by the change?
2. What local circumstances might make the change unfold differently in different parts of the organisation?
3. Where might bringing different people into contact reveal something that none could explain on their own?

Deduction — what can we reliably apply?

1. What established knowledge or relationships do we believe apply to this situation?
2. What assumptions are we making about the conditions under which they will continue to hold?
3. What evidence would make us reconsider them?

Induction — what patterns are we seeing?

1. What patterns appear to be emerging across what is happening?
2. Where do different people see different patterns in the same events?
3. Which apparent patterns might simply reflect what we expected or wanted to find?

Abduction — what else could plausibly be happening?

1. What different explanations could plausibly account for what we are seeing?
2. Which explanations are we dismissing too quickly because they do not fit our current story?
3. What could we do next that would help us learn which possibilities deserve more attention?

This changes the quality of a change conversation. Instead of asking people to debate whose interpretation is correct, we can make different interpretations available to one another. Instead of treating seniority as a proxy for knowledge, we can look for knowledge wherever it resides. And rather than turning uncertainty into a demand for another plan, we can ask what small action might help us discover something we do not yet know.

From better sensemaking to better action

None of this argues for endless reflection. In fact, in genuinely complex situations, waiting until we understand everything before acting is itself a mistake because some things can only be understood through interaction. The shift is from acting because we believe we have understood the situation towards acting partly in order to learn more about the situation. That might mean running a small experiment, changing one constraint, observing what happens when two groups work differently, trying several approaches in parallel or simply getting closer to where something unexpected is occurring.

The scale and reversibility of the action matter. If uncertainty is high, smaller probes allow us to learn without making an unnecessarily large commitment to an explanation that may turn out to be wrong. What happens next then becomes new information. We can amplify what appears useful, dampen what is not, explore anomalies and revise our understanding as the situation changes.

Reflection for leaders

Before moving on, think about a decision or situation you are currently facing where the picture remains incomplete. The purpose is not to solve it here, but to notice where your current sensemaking might be narrowing the possibilities you can see.

1. Which of the nine perspectives would most challenge the way I am currently understanding this situation?
2. What knowledge, experience or perspective might I currently be missing, discounting or keeping at a distance?
3. What could I do next that would help me learn something before making a larger commitment?

Making better decisions within uncertainty

This is where I find the trialectics particularly useful. They do not give me another model to impose on a situation. Their value is almost the opposite. They make it harder for me to collapse a situation too quickly into the explanation I already have. They remind me that what attracts my attention is not everything that matters, that useful knowledge may not sit in a document or even neatly within an individual, and that the most familiar explanation is not necessarily the only plausible one.

Used personally, the questions can challenge how I make sense of what is happening. Used with others, they can help create conversations in which different experiences, forms of knowledge and explanations encounter one another without requiring those differences to be prematurely resolved. They do not remove uncertainty. They can help us become more thoughtful about how we act within it. See more. Assume less. Make sense together. Act to learn. Adapt to what you discover.

Sources

Snowden, D. (2026a) ‘Trialectics, or thinking in threes’, The Cynefin Company, 6 May. Available at: https://thecynefin.co/thinking-in-threes/ (Accessed: 8 September 2026).

Snowden, D. (2026b) ‘What We Cannot Say’, The Cynefin Company, 8 May. Available at: https://thecynefin.co/what-we-cannot-say/ (Accessed: 8 September 2026).

Snowden, D. (2026c) ‘The Shape of Knowing’, The Cynefin Company, 9 May. Available at: https://thecynefin.co/the-shape-of-knowing/ (Accessed: 8 September 2026).

The Cynefin Company (2026) ‘In The Estuary, Overlaid, Dave Snowden brings trialectics into Estuarine Mapping’, LinkedIn, 4 September. Available at: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/the-cynefin-company_changemanagement-businessstrategy-systemthinking-activity-7501301925859004417-6caS (Accessed: 7 September 2026).