Be More Honey Badger – Decision making in uncertainty

Honey badgers have a reputation for outsize aggression and an unconquerable attitude. Essential if your diet relies on raiding bee hives and eating venomous snakes. Short and squat they are built for battle, with thick loose skin that makes them very hard to damage, as numerous video clips of them fighting big cats, poisonous snakes, porcupines and even elephants will attest.  They are the epitome of what Nassim Taleb calls antifragile. A creature that thrives on volatility and disorder.

For many businesses the current overriding sensation is of uncertainty. The volatility, range, speed and impact of external stressors disrupt confidence and undermine forecasting. A frequent consequence of uncertainty is paralysis. Decisions don’t get made; they get deferred, passed around or avoided altogether. Usually in the hope that more information will emerge, that will finally make it clear what we should do, as though the problem were some sort of glorified Rubik’s Cube for which a solution can surely be found. More information will emerge with time but simultaneously your options for effective action are likely decreasing – especially in a competitive environment. For lack of certainty, you missed the chance.

If uncertainty is not going away, how can we get better at making decisions under conditions of uncertainty?

Learn from the Outliers

Some of the most effective decision-making environments are also the most extreme.

Special forces teams and trauma care units are team and decision-making environments that are unusual in many of their characteristics. Most obviously that the stakes are about life and death. For a trauma surgeon their normal day is someone else’s worst nightmare. Extreme outliers like this are mostly very different to business but they can illuminate important insights and lessons about decision making and can offer helpful signposts and guided translation. They reveal what works when time is limited, information is incomplete, and hesitation is costly. We can’t copy these environments directly, but we can certainly learn from them.

Diagnose the problem: Clock or Cloud?

One of the most useful starting points is understanding the type of problem you’re dealing with. There are several frameworks that can assist with a rapid triage but personally I like to begin with a question: is this a clock or a cloud type problem?[1]

Clock type problems, though they have many parts also have a correct solution. They are right or wrong. Problems like this are complicated but also amenable to check lists, flow charts and benefit from highly experienced operators who have seen many problems that look just like this. Flying aeroplanes and heart surgery are representative of this kind of problem.

Cloud type problems on the other hand represent complexity. The kinds of problems that have inter-acting variables some of which may be somewhat predictable, but others are poorly understood or invisible to us. These types of problems have outcomes that may be better or worse but not a single correct answer. They are often characterised by a high degree of novelty and either too much or little information for us to properly understand what is going on.

Most businesses deal with a mixture of both types of problem but it’s ‘clouds’ where we face the challenges of uncertainty and unpredictability. Knowing the kind of problem you are dealing with sets up different approaches for decision making and problem solving.

This distinction matters. Clock problems reward precision and experience. Cloud problems require adaptation, experimentation, and judgement under uncertainty. Misdiagnosing one as the other is where many organisations struggle applying rigid processes to problems that demand flexibility or improvising where discipline is required.

Act in the Face of Fear

Feral intelligence is something special forces teams look for and cultivate. It’s the ability to adapt and figure things out in highly dynamic situations. The honey badger embodies this kind of street-smart approach to life, as do small children. Pre-school kids are constantly figuring things out through trial and error. They’re not book smart, but they are very curious, constantly experimenting with the question of what happens if…? This dynamic action, in the system, creates rapid learning and adaptation.

Act, Learn, Adjust, Repeat

The mistakes or failures in this approach are just data in a feedback system. Small children are naturally adventurous and quite comfortable with what an adult would immediately frame as risk.  When uncertain, our instinct can be toward inaction, wait and see, in the hope of future revelation or reassurance.

A quick decision and action feel high-risk and trigger fear. Fear of letting go. Fear of leaving what we are certain of, fear of getting it wrong and being seen to ‘fail’. Yet failure is crucial to effective adaptation. It’s the boundary marker of what we know or can do and is therefore highly instructive of what needs to be adjusted next time so we can progress further. This ability to act in the face of uncertainty – when what we feel is anxiety rather than confidence -is a crucial habit. It’s one we all had as children but which we mostly tend to lose.

In uncertain environments, inaction is often the greater risk. It delays learning, reduces optionality, and allows competitors to move ahead. Acting quickly may feel uncomfortable, but it accelerates feedback and adaptation. The goal is not reckless or uncalculated action, but informed movement: small, reversible steps that generate insight and expand understanding.

Be More Honey Badger

The honey badger doesn’t wait for perfect information. It doesn’t pause to model every possible outcome. It acts, adapts, and persists.

That doesn’t mean being blindly aggressive. It means being willing to engage with uncertainty rather than retreat from it.

In practice, this looks like:

• Diagnosing the problem correctly – is this a clock or a cloud?
• Acting sooner rather than later – a bias for action
• Designing for learning – treating action as part of a feedback system
• Normalising ‘failure’ – as data, not judgement

Uncertainty isn’t a temporary disruption; it’s a permanent feature. The organisations that succeed won’t be those that eliminate it, but those that learn to operate effectively within it.  Antifragile and a little more like honey badgers.

[1] From a lecture by the physicist and philosopher Karl Popper entitled, Of Clouds and Clocks, An Approach to the Problems of Rationality and the Freedom of Man.