For thousands of years, religion helped humans answer questions that had no measurable answers.
Why are we here?
What happens after death?
Why do bad things happen?
What does the future hold?
Whether those answers are right or wrong is not the point.
The point is that humans have always struggled with uncertainty.
And when uncertainty appears, we instinctively create stories.
Those stories help us move forward.
Religion was one of humanity’s earliest examples.
It certainly wasn’t the last.
A friend called me recently after someone gained access to a bank account she helps manage for her kids’ hockey team and attempted to move funds out.
Fortunately, the transaction was caught before any money was lost.
Her first question was immediate.
“What spyware or malware scanner should I run?”
Before discussing scanners, I told her to change her password, contact the bank, and secure the account.
Then I asked:
“What happened before the account was compromised?”
She explained that she needed to access the team’s bank account. She searched for it online, clicked the first result, and arrived at a website that looked completely legitimate.
Looking back, there were a couple of warning signs.
Normally, her browser saves her password, so she rarely has to enter it manually. This time, she was prompted to type it in.
She entered her username and password.
Then she entered the MFA code when asked.
Unfortunately, that gave the attackers everything they needed.
Within minutes, they attempted to access the real account using the stolen credentials and MFA code.
Thankfully, another team member who also had access to the account received a notification, recognized that something wasn’t right, and intervened before any funds were lost.
At that point, the facts were relatively straightforward.
A convincing phishing site had captured valid credentials.
Yet almost immediately, new explanations started appearing.
Maybe there was malware on the computer.
Maybe a virus had stolen the password.
Maybe the account had been compromised some other way.
Maybe attackers had been monitoring her activity.
Maybe there was something else we hadn’t discovered yet.
What struck me wasn’t the incident itself.
What struck me was how quickly the conversation shifted from facts to explanations.
We already had a highly plausible explanation supported by the evidence.
Yet we continued searching for additional stories.
That’s when I realized this wasn’t really a cybersecurity discussion.
It was a human behavior discussion.
Most people think uncertainty is the problem.
I increasingly believe uncertainty is simply reality.
The real question is what happens next.
Humans are uncomfortable sitting inside unanswered questions.
We naturally search for explanations.
We build narratives.
We create confidence.
And then we make decisions based on that confidence.
The same pattern exists everywhere.
A company misses its targets.
Leadership immediately searches for a reason.
A project runs behind schedule.
A team quickly identifies a culprit.
A security incident occurs.
Everyone starts building theories.
Sometimes those explanations are correct.
Sometimes they are not.
The danger isn’t the story itself.
The danger is how quickly the story becomes accepted.
Once a narrative takes hold, something subtle happens.
Investigation slows.
Alternative explanations disappear.
Contradictory evidence gets discounted.
Resources begin flowing toward defending the explanation rather than testing it.
The organization stops learning.
It starts defending the narrative.
Many of the largest failures I’ve observed were not caused by a lack of information.
They were caused by premature certainty.
People often assume organizations have information problems.
I think many organizations actually have confidence problems.
More specifically, they have difficulty distinguishing between:
What they know.
What they assume.
What they believe.
And what they need to decide.
Those are not the same thing.
Yet they are frequently treated as if they are.
This realization has changed how I think about technology.
Most technology conversations begin with solutions.
What software should we buy?
What platform should we implement?
What dashboard should we build?
What AI tool should we adopt?
I find myself asking different questions.
What do we know?
What are we assuming?
What evidence would change our conclusion?
What decision are we actually trying to make?
Because technology is rarely the root issue.
Technology is often the visible layer of a deeper decision-making problem.
The longer I work in technology, the less interested I become in tools.
The more interested I become in how people form conclusions.
How they create confidence.
How narratives spread through organizations.
And how easily confidence can be mistaken for truth.
Religion, leadership, business, technology, and psychology appear unrelated on the surface.
Underneath, they are often solving the same problem.
Humans need enough confidence to act in an uncertain world.
The challenge is that confidence and truth are not the same thing.
Uncertainty is unavoidable.
The real risk is not uncertainty itself.
The real risk is how quickly we replace it with a story.
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