Managing Uncertainty In Change: What Cognitive and Emotional Resistance Actually Need
Written By Maciej
A few years ago, Brit Watson was a project management leader running a healthcare PMO, watching change roll through patient services on one side of her life, while on the other, her father was diagnosed with a severe chronic condition that would become palliative. She needed to manage personal change and professional change at the same time, with the same nervous system, and she noticed something that most change frameworks don’t account for: the tools she had for one didn’t automatically work for the other.
That experience is part of what led her to co-found the Anchor and Ascend Institute in Ontario, Canada. On this episode of Change Doesn’t Have to Suck, recorded at Change Orlando, Brit – the Institute’s founder and Chief Experience Officer – lays out the idea she was in Orlando to speak about: you don’t resolve uncertainty, you manage it. And the way you manage it depends entirely on what kind of uncertainty you’re actually looking at.
If you’ve already got the “Managing Uncertainty in Change” Tip-Sheet from this episode, this article fills in the detail behind it – the research, the stories, and the reasoning the six tips are built on.
The difference between cognitive and emotional uncertainty
Cognitive uncertainty is a genuine information gap. People don’t know a piece of information – a timeline, a decision, a next step – and that gap is real and fillable. Give them the missing information and the uncertainty resolves.
Emotional uncertainty isn’t about what people don’t know. It’s about how they feel about not knowing. And this is where Brit says most change management goes wrong: leaders and practitioners treat emotional uncertainty as if it were cognitive, and respond with more information, another FAQ, another town hall, another slide deck – none of which touches the actual problem.
“Another FAQ, another town hall, another deck,” as Brit puts it – when the concern is emotional, more information doesn’t just fail to help. It signals to people that their real question was never heard in the first place.
Vague reassurance makes this worse, not better. Telling a team “it’s okay, we’re going to make this change, it’s going to be great” costs nothing and lands as exactly that – nothing. Brit calls these vague statements unhelpful almost by design: they don’t validate the feeling, and they don’t acknowledge that the leader might not have all the answers either.
Why the sentence that costs nothing works
What Brit recommends instead is a specific move: naming the shared uncertainty out loud. Her exact phrasing is worth using directly:
We also don’t know – and anyone in our situation would feel the same way.
Two things are happening in that one sentence. First, it’s honest about what leadership actually doesn’t know – no invented certainty, no over-promising. Second, it gives explicit permission for whatever reaction people are having, which does more to stabilise a room than any amount of new information could.
The goal, in Brit’s words, is creating a “container” – a space where people understand that their feelings are valid and that they’re not navigating the uncertainty alone. The common mistake she sees in change practice is the opposite: handing people the workbook, the schedule, the legislation, the plan – and leaving them just as unsettled as before, because none of it addressed how they felt about what’s happening, only what’s happening.
Vulnerability is a leadership skill, not a weakness
Brit traces this back to psychological safety – but not the version that gets reduced to a poster in a break room. She references Amy Edmondson’s model of psychological safety and makes a specific point about the gap between messaging it and modelling it: a leader can say “it’s okay to make mistakes here” as often as they like, but if that leader is never actually seen not knowing something, the message and the behaviour don’t match – and the mismatch generates more uncertainty, not less.
This idea came up in a conversation Brit had with her business partner, Melissa, who put it more bluntly than any leadership framework does: “People ain’t dumb.” People can tell when a leader is being inauthentic, and when trust is broken that way – because someone was constrained by the organisation, or by their own discomfort with being vulnerable – the effect compounds. As Brit describes it, the trust becomes fragmented, fractured, and very hard to lead through afterward.
This is also the thinking behind a diagnostic tool Anchor and Ascend has been developing to measure change readiness and adoption likelihood: sponsorship credibility. It checks two things – whether people actually believe what their leader is telling them (do they walk the talk, in other words), and whether that leader is themselves genuinely sponsored by the level above them. A break in either link and trust collapses, right when people need it most.
Brit points to a pattern she’s seen repeatedly in healthcare and aged care: individual sites that develop their own effective way of doing things, out of step with what head office intended, because the regional leadership responsible for connecting them wasn’t consistently walking the talk on the ground. The sites weren’t failing to try. They were disconnected from a credible sponsorship chain, so the change never became universal across the organisation.
Why your loudest critic might be your best data source
Traditionally, the person pushing back hardest on a change gets treated as a problem to manage. Brit’s experience runs the other way: dissenters are often the most valuable source of information in the entire change process, if you’re willing to actually engage with them instead of working around them.
The reasoning is biological, not just interpersonal. When a change presents as a threat, the body’s response doesn’t distinguish between an organisational restructure and a physical predator – the same ancient nervous system wiring fires either way. Under threat, the amygdala starts shutting down other functions, which is why you’ll see reactions that look wildly disproportionate to the actual situation. That disproportion isn’t noise. It’s a reading of how much threat is actually in the system for that person, shaped by things you may never fully see, including past experience and trauma.
Handled with vulnerability and recognition rather than dismissal, these are frequently the people sitting at the far end of a polarity – and understanding where they sit tells you a huge amount about how to make the rest of the organisation feel safer through the same change.
There’s an encouraging flip side to this, and Brit has seen it play out consistently: win over someone who was genuinely resistant – not by overpowering their objection, but by actually hearing it – and they often become the most credible informal sponsor of the change you have. She describes watching a single converted skeptic mention, almost casually, that they’d found a good use for a new piece of software, a few times, in a few different conversations – and watching that ripple out until an entire department had come around, well ahead of anything the formal change plan had scheduled.
From VUCA to BANI: why the old language of uncertainty stopped working
Brit’s session at Change Orlando also traced how the vocabulary the field uses for uncertainty has had to evolve. VUCA – volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous – was coined by the US Army in the 1980s to describe genuinely exceptional moments. The issue now, as Brit puts it, is that organisations are so persistently steeped in volatility and uncertainty that treating it as an exceptional event no longer serves any purpose. We’re the fish, and that’s the water.
Jamais Cascio’s 2018 framework, BANI – brittle, anxious, non-linear, incomprehensible – is Brit’s preferred lens for where things actually sit now: increasingly rigid systems, built during periods of relative stability, that aren’t flexible enough for how quickly things now move. Organisations end up building from a place of anxiety rather than a place of recognised stability, because stability itself doesn’t last the way it used to.
One consequence Brit has watched emerge, especially among younger employees, is defuturing – the sense that there’s no real point in planning ahead, because the future as it used to be imagined doesn’t meaningfully exist anymore. It’s the “why would I make a five-year plan, the world is burning” sentiment, and Brit is clear that it’s a genuinely hopeless place to operate from, not a character flaw to correct.
Her answer is a concept she describes as her favourite in the whole field: refuturing. The core move is shortening the time horizon deliberately, until a future becomes visible again – something concrete enough that a person can start rebuilding a sense of agency. Rather than defending an untenable five-year plan, shrink the horizon down to something real and immediate: a Friday coffee with a colleague, a next step you can actually see. Agency comes back at that smaller scale, even when it’s disappeared entirely at the five-year scale.
This connects directly to how Brit thinks about burnout – not as a personal or individual failing, but as what happens when someone’s values and their environment are misaligned for long enough that the mental and physiological cost of just keeping up becomes unsustainable. In brittle, fast-moving systems that aren’t adapting alongside the people in them, that cost adds up fast.
Values as an anchor, not a rulebook
The final piece of Brit’s framework addresses something most values statements get wrong: values are usually written as a fidelity model, where holding a value means never deviating from it – which becomes destabilising the moment a real constraint forces a decision that doesn’t fit. Brit gives a direct example: a leader who says integrity is a core value, then has to conduct layoffs without full transparency about why, and experiences real cognitive dissonance as a result – not because they lack integrity, but because the fidelity model gave them no room to be human about it.
Her alternative is a concept she calls the authentic chameleon: the idea that you can accentuate or attenuate how a value shows up, depending on the situation, without abandoning the value itself. If full transparency isn’t available to you in a given moment – because of organisational constraint, confidentiality, or timing – you can still choose to be empathetic. The value doesn’t disappear. It flexes, and it comes back to centre once the constraint lifts.
Brit extends this same flexibility to change methodology itself, and this is arguably the most practical, least-discussed point in the whole conversation: change practitioners get attached to their own frameworks in exactly the way organisations get attached to rigid values statements. Everyone has the flow of activities they trust, and the instinct – understandable, very human – is to run every change through the same process regardless of who’s actually in front of you.
Brit draws a comparison from her own background as a competitive powerlifter: what you train a thousand times in the gym is what shows up automatically on the platform. Change practitioners build the same grooves. The fix isn’t abandoning a framework that works – it’s staying willing to borrow from other methodologies where they genuinely add value, even if that means running your usual approach at 90% instead of 100%, adapted to the actual people and situation in front of you rather than applied uniformly.
The takeaway
Brit’s closing advice ties the whole conversation together: the goal in managing change was never to be perfect. It’s to be authentic – anchored in your values, willing to be vulnerable, and genuinely present for the people navigating the change alongside you. Her last point is the simplest and, for anyone leading change right now, probably the most reassuring: you are not on an island by yourself. Everyone doing this work is on their own island, navigating the same water.
The Outlier Group
A specialist Change Management agency who design and deploys change campaigns that are memorable and move the needle.
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