The dialogue began from a provocation in February 2026, “Risk Reductionism: Why the WEF’s Tidy Lists Are Part of the Problem.” The piece argued that the World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report 2026 and its familiar infographic, two ranked lists colour-coded in red, blue, yellow, and green, was not mapping risk so much as performing ideological comfort: the reassurance that cascading, entangled crises can be separated, ranked, and assigned to the appropriate portfolio. Drawing on Indy Johar’s question “whose way of seeing risk is doing the seeing?” and on Thomas Homer-Dixon and the Cascade Institute’s stress-trigger-crisis framework, the piece proposed that the graphic’s classificatory logic itself reproduces the extractive worldview that produces the dangers it claims to describe. It argued for retiring the ranked list and moving from a theory of control to a theory of care.
A LinkedIn exchange around that piece drew in Antony Malmo, who sharpened the critique into a psychological and cultural claim: that our risk tools function as intellectual crutches, letting us cling to a sense of control and knowability and avoid the deeper, anxiety-provoking truth. This dialogue accepted the invitation to stay with that truth.
Antony Malmo and Nicola Robins set out the provocation in its sharpened form: that the familiar grammar of risk, the ranked lists, heatmaps, probability distributions, is performing the wrong work. It is not mapping the territory so much as soothing the anxiety of unknowing. When risks are systemic, cascading, and entangled, when the world operates as a complex adaptive system rather than a set of silos, the mathematics begins to function, as Antony put it at the opening, on a par with astrology.
What then? Much of the dialogue turned on that question. Nicola brought Ngoma practice into the conversation not as a romantic alternative but as a living set of cognitive technologies, spirits, divination, and ritual, honed over millennia to navigate rupture when order fails. The exchange then opened outward into paradigms of uncertainty (Steven Segal), into the question of whether uncertainty needs its own distinct language rather than being absorbed into the grammar of risk (Annal Dhungana), into embodiment and intuition as modes of intelligence marginalised by rationalism, into the time horizons of uncertainty (Alan Fowler), into what it means to be personally uncertain in a globalised world that erodes traditional grounding (Nhlanhla Ndlovu), into Rod Suskin’s observation that divination and astrology share a structural logic of pattern recognition from the past, and into the paradox of building uncertainty frameworks that do not themselves become new forms of certainty (Joe Redston, Joan Lurie).
The frame Antony set was this: risk calculations assume measurable, bounded uncertainty. In deep uncertainty, the condition described by Knight in the 1920s and revived in recent work by John Kay and Mervyn King (Radical Uncertainty) and Roger Spitz (deep uncertainty), there are too many unknowns and too many interacting forces for the calculations to hold. Systems operate non-linearly. Effects cascade. The comfort that ranked lists of risk provide is a comfort the underlying territory does not actually support.
“In deep or radical uncertainty, we simply cannot calculate. There are too many unknowns, too many interacting forces. Risk calculations are on a par with astrology.” Antony Malmo
Antony’s sharper question was psychological, even anthropological: is this a universal human condition, the brain as prediction machine trying to reduce uncertainty, or is it a conditioning of a particular time and place, the North Atlantic scientific rationalism of the last several centuries, which has trained us to believe we can “math it out” and hold command and control? If it is the latter, then the task is not only to refine our tools. It is to examine our collective relationship with not-knowing itself.
Nicola offered a distinction that ran through the rest of the conversation: the difference between transition, an orderly change from here to there, and rupture, when things crack and the past bubbles up through the cracks. Rupture is when the old linear assumptions fail. And rupture is not unprecedented in human experience; different cultures have developed different ways of working with it. Ngoma traditions, she noted, are not small hunter-gatherer practices but systems developed within cultures that ran trade networks across Africa to India and China, that managed surplus at the scale of empire, and therefore had to manage the unintended consequences that come with accumulated wealth.
Within that history, three tools stood out. Spirits: in an animist worldview, the world is alive and agency is distributed, fluid, always interacting, like water. This is not a metaphor adjacent to complexity science; it is a different way of describing the same recognition that we cannot sort agency into tidy categories. Climate change is not solvable on its own; what matters is how it interacts with poverty, corruption, unemployment, biodiversity decline, geopolitics. Agency lives in the interactions.
Divination: Nicola was careful here. Traditional African divination was never about prediction. It was a representational technology for making sense in uncertainty together. Bones, shells, seeds, coins scattered randomly become a dynamic map, and the diviner holds the collective process of reading it. People gather, the diviner speaks a reading, and everyone says the ritual phrase that translates as “we agree,” but they convey their actual degree of agreement through the body. The practitioner tracks the embodied response and refines the reading. It is a social, collective, embodied practice of honing the story closer to the truth, not an expert performance.
Ritual: in contemporary terms, a structured change technology, honed over generations for reliability in the exact moments when things go wrong. A simple ritual might be putting on a particular cloth each time one speaks with the ancestors, creating an unconscious association that itself carries agency. More complex rituals are carefully designed, often fractal in structure, and can force emergence in the complexity-science sense, producing something that was not predicted but moves in the direction sought. Humans, she argued, are ritual specialists; as our extractive technologies have grown more powerful, our ritual capacity has become more, not less, necessary.
“These are three cognitive technologies, spirits, divination and ritual, developing alongside extractive technologies to help people navigate deep uncertainty.” Nicola Robins
Antony observed that outside the rooms where mathematicians and insurers actually know the models are just models, we glom on to the chart, the graph, the estimation. Enterprise sales and political rhetoric both work by perturbing fear of uncertainty and then offering certainty back as a soothing product. The original name for the con man, he noted, was confidence man, someone who speaks confidently. It is tempting to listen.
Nicola located this in evolutionary terms: certainty is low cognitive load, uncertainty is high. We are wired to save brain energy, and uncertainty costs it. In chat, Annal Dhungana’s research confirmed the point from another angle: even when uncertainty is communicated explicitly, decision-makers will reach for certainty in how they receive it.
Antony named the exec-team version: people are paid to have answers, bias toward action drives collapse of uncertainty toward output, and teams beeline for conclusions even when the conclusion is arbitrary. Tamzin in the chat brought the political version directly into the room: does Donald Trump’s appeal rest on his portrayal of certainty, and might the uncertainty of his actions eventually shift that reality? Laura Alfers responded that Trump promised change rather than certainty but justified the uncertainty of his actions as a necessary part of that change.
“When things are certain, it is very easy to make decisions. We don’t use much cognitive energy. When things are uncertain, we really have to work hard, and we are evolutionarily honed to save that kind of brain energy, because it uses a lot of it.” Nicola Robins
Antony confessed to living in his head, a year of Gestalt training still on his mind, and framed the question: in North Atlantic culture many people treat the body as a vehicle for transporting the brain to meetings. Nicola offered the 4E cognition frame from cognitive neuroscience, cognition as embodied, embedded, enacted, and extended. Perhaps 90% of what we call rational decision-making is already decided by the body and by our history, and the comforting story that we decide analytically is itself a kind of protection against recognising what is actually doing the deciding.
Within organisations, she noted, the word intuition is treated as dangerous, but embodied cognition is simply a more intelligent way of making sense when there is no single right answer. Antony asked whether the task, for people of his heritage, is learning or unlearning. Nicola replied: both, and mostly neither, because the real work is finding the right context for what we have learned, rather than letting rationalist frames flood our understanding of everything.
Steven Segal intervened with a careful distinction that reshaped the conversation. Not all uncertainties are the same kind of thing. Objective uncertainties sit in situations outside us, and those are the uncertainties risk discourse usually addresses. Subjective uncertainty is different: it is the experience of the ground giving way, of having no tools for reading the world, of losing the framework within which sense-making was possible. He connected this to decolonisation as a practice of working across paradigms, and to what he called the anxiety of the strangeness of the other: the capacity to stay with that strangeness without collapsing it into the same.
Nicola picked this up directly. Anxiety has a place. It is a signal that something needs attention. Western frames often treat anxiety as a symptom to be reduced, perhaps medicated, so that work can proceed. Ngoma traditions, by contrast, place the anxious person in a ritual context that is safe on the outside and deliberately intensifies the anxiety on the inside, on the principle that the mind has the capacity to break through it into a new way of seeing. Not everyone can, but most can, and the breakthrough is the point.
“We are coming to a time now where we colonialists, and I am a colonialist, are needing to come to terms with our projections. Working with subjective anxiety, not just objective anxiety.” Steven Segal
Antony added a frame: in earlier eras, personal life was precarious and the planet was relatively stable; now, for many in the developed world, personal life is relatively safe while the large-scale, planetary-scale uncertainties press in. Timothy Morton’s “hyperobjects,” climate, AI, geopolitics, occupy attention while being incomprehensible in scale and beyond our individual agency. Nicola gently corrected the generalisation: personal safety is not the experience of most of the world.
Annal Dhungana offered what Nicola later called one of the most useful interventions of the dialogue. The entire vocabulary of risk, its frameworks, tools, and definitions, has been developed across a century of work in economics, actuarial science, and insurance, and it all assumes quantifiability. Uncertainty, properly understood, is a different thing, and we keep absorbing it into the grammar of risk because we have no language explicit to it. The practical consequence: when uncertainty is raised in decision-making rooms, the conversation immediately snaps back to risk quantification, and uncertainty disappears as a distinct object of thought.
“Maybe it is time to separate risk and uncertainty and start discussing uncertainty separately. If we had a different tool or framework just for uncertainty, how good that would be.” Annal Dhungana
Bryan Joseph in the chat nuanced this: perhaps what we need is not tools for managing uncertainty, which reproduces the quantification instinct, but tools for describing uncertainty. Rossi Walter reinforced the distinction from the climate-finance angle: linking financial outputs to a specific paradigm of risk gives that paradigm disproportionate power in decisions about where capital flows for climate resilience, which matters enormously to how the transition is actually funded.
Nicola responded that this may be exactly why the Ngoma tools are difficult to bring into the boardroom, not because of spirits or divination as such, but because they are uncertainty-native tools in a setting that speaks risk.
Antony raised what he described as a genuine tension. As a North Atlantic heritage man, he is curious about indigenous knowledge and aware that its public circulation tends to strip context and cheapen the material. If the dominant frames are WEIRD (Western, educated, industrialised, rich, democratic), what options are available to people inside those frames for engaging indigenous ways of knowing without either romanticising or appropriating?
Nicola’s answer was careful. When we seek to scale indigenous knowledge, we increase the risk of cultural appropriation. We need to grow our capacity to notice when it is happening, rather than to avoid engagement. The deeper work is not to “learn from indigenous knowledge”—often an invitation extended outward, which reproduces the colonial pattern—but to recognise that one’s own perspective has filters, that the science one was taught in school is a particular science, and carries particular llimitations. She suggested that decolonisation has to be done contextually, it looks different in South Africa, in the UK, in Australia, in the US.
Andrew Kelly asked the practical question: is there one thing, one ritual, one heuristic, which can simplify the way we stand in complexity? Both speakers independently named the Cynefin Framework as a useful lens for distinguishing clear, complicated, complex, and chaotic domains and for knowing which one one is in. Antony added that people tend to oscillate between dismissing complexity by making things simple and collapsing into “it is all chaos;” the uncomfortable, intelligent place is the middle, the obvious rule of thumb for which is still the Serenity Prayer: know the difference between what you can change and what you cannot.
Later in the conversation, responding to Joan Lurie, Antony offered three reframings that landed for many in the room:
“Prediction to preparation. Probabilities to possibilities. Models to imagination.” Antony Malmo
Alan Fowler pressed a question that had been hovering: we are not being explicit enough about the time frames within which we are talking about uncertainty. Uncertainty at the scale of this generation is different from uncertainty at the scale of the next, or the one after. Authoring a book on gifting as a human relational driver across long historical time, he found himself stuck on the final chapter: how far into the future is it legitimate to look? Nicola affirmed the critical nature of the question and confessed that her own focus has shifted; she thinks about the long term, but the short term now commands her attention, whether her child will be safe today, whether Cape Town will become too hot in the next ten years for people she knows to survive.
“Be a good ancestor. The short term is a subset of the long term.” Andrew Kelly, in the chat
Nhlanhla Ndlovu’s contribution grounded the conversation in a specific lived uncertainty. As a traditional Zulu man living in suburban, globalised South Africa, practising the rituals his tradition requires, slaughtering at the right times, bringing spirits home from hospitals where family members have died, he faces a tension that is ordinary for him and invisible to the institutions around him. If the rituals are not done, risk accumulates spiritually for himself and his children. The educational and professional ambition his family encourages simultaneously erodes the belief systems in which such risks are legible. The uncertainty is not macro or abstract; it is the texture of a life held between two ways of knowing.
Nicola responded that this granular, personal testimony is what the conversation exists to listen to. Post-colonial governance in South Africa did not intend to continue the erasure of cultures, and yet that is often what happens, sometimes under the banner of decolonisation itself. The task of doing things better runs through all these threads.
Rod Suskin, trained in Ngoma from childhood and also working as a Western astrologer, added a structural observation that sharpened Nicola’s earlier account. The spirits Ngoma works with are specifically the spirits of one’s ancestors. Divination does not predict the future; it works on the principle that everything which happens to us has happened before, and the ancestors, having experienced it, know what to do. Many of the bones used in divination refer to specific ancestors. So, while African divination does not predict, it explains the present by appealing to the past, and in doing so it reduces anxiety and uncertainty by locating the present moment in a pattern that has precedent.
“The way to reduce anxiety and uncertainty in terms of Ngoma culture is by appealing to the past, with the principle that everything that happens has happened before. The western half of me practises as an astrologer, and while some people think, what the hell, an astrologer in the 21st century, the point is that astrology is about exactly the same thing. The assumption it makes is that what happens in the future is similar to what happens in the past. Planetary cycles as cycles of timing. However accurate or inaccurate they may be, that is the principle.” Rod Suskin
Nicola built on Rod’s point: ancestors in Ngoma began as biological kin but, as Ngoma cultures encountered large-scale disruption, colonialism, war, extractive technology, they adapted. Large-scale rupture displaces spirits from their places; displaced spirits roam and can afflict. Entire lineages of Ngoma developed technologies for working with war ancestors and other non-biological spirits that emerge in times of collective rupture. Gerry Salole offered the unifying observation:
“Surely what connects all of this is that it is an attempt at pattern recognition.” Gerry Salole
Joe Redston asked a question that made the conversation turn on itself. Some of the best-known voices in complexity and uncertainty come across as remarkably certain about their frameworks. Is the search for a framework to clarify uncertainty not itself a quest for certainty, an avoidance of the uncertainty it claims to address? Is an uncertainty framework an oxymoron?
Antony offered Pascal’s sphere of ignorance: as the sphere of what we know expands, its surface area, which is where it meets the unknown, grows faster than its volume. Science in principle is built on doubt and falsifiability; in practice, he noted, his scientific colleagues often sound like religious zealots about their frameworks. Nicola answered the paradox by distinguishing frameworks used as handholds in uncertainty, from frameworks mistaken for reality.For example, in Ngoma, the spirit genealogies are themselves a framework. Oral cultures, she suggested, may have a structural advantage over literate ones, because writing something down makes it easier to mistake the framework for what it describes.
Joan Lurie then added a further twist that reframed the dialogue’s core tension: there are different kinds of uncertainty being named in the word itself, and the distinction between them matters. Her contribution opens the closing reflections that follow.
Annal’s intervention on the distinct language of uncertainty prompted Antony to share a passage from Tyson Yunkaporta’s Sand Talk that stayed with several participants. Aboriginal languages in Australia, Yunkaporta notes, often have no word for safety, because safety cannot be provided; what can be provided is protection. “I have got your back, and you have got mine.” The reframing from safety to protection is from a passive state to an agentic, reciprocal one. Rossi Walter picked this up in the chat as a paradigm shift worth digging into, particularly in climate-volatile global contexts.
As the conversation drew toward its close, two voices gave it a particular shape that sat beyond any single thread, and one of those voices continued afterward in writing.
Joan Lurie’s contributions in both the chat and on the floor pulled the conversation into a registration that had not been there before: the recognition that comfort with uncertainty cannot be carried by individuals alone, one person at a time, and that the organisational scale is where the real work of holding uncertainty has to happen.
“We can’t rely on individuals getting comfortable with uncertainty one person at a time. We could design uncertainty infrastructure into organisational systems. I believe these are the containing rituals, practices, constraints, which become the change technology which builds the capacity for leveraging uncertainty in the system. So paradoxically, you invite uncertainty in, but in the containment of ritual inside organisational contexts.” Joan Lurie
She then drew the link that gave the dialogue one of its most generative framings: that the grammar of risk is a set of rules, a set of containment, and that what is needed now is a grammar of uncertainty, built into the containers of collective life so uncertainty can be held rather than individually endured. In a later chat comment she pushed further still, reframing the relationship between uncertainty and risk as something more paradoxical than the dialogue had yet named:
“Aren’t we holding the assumption that driving for certainty, being in our certainty, is creating risk? Paradoxically, it’s not the risks we face, but the risks which emerge from the certainty. Certainty then is as much of a risk as uncertainty. It’s that old cobra principle that sometimes in systems our solutions to our presenting challenges, perceived problems, become our problems.” Joan Lurie, in the chat
And then one further distinction that Antony picked up aloud and several participants returned to:
“Deep uncertainty is “I’m not sure” versus “I can’t predict what will happen.” Different kinds of uncertainty.” Joan Lurie, in the chat
Karen Rivoire, in the chat, picked this up as a closing gift: “the uncertainty of being us, as a gift, not as risk, even if entangled.”
Steven Segal had offered the earliest conceptual distinction in the dialogue, between objective uncertainty (located in situations outside us) and subjective uncertainty (the ground giving way beneath one’s own sense-making). That distinction did quiet work through the rest of the conversation. He closed his live intervention with a phrase that Antony returned to at the very end of the session: “the anxiety of the strangeness of the other,” and the task of working across paradigms without collapsing that strangeness into the same.
Steven wrote with a reflection that deserves to sit in these notes as part of the arc of the conversation itself.
“Many different forms of uncertainty began to emerge through the group discussion itself. There was a real richness in how participants were implicitly pointing toward different kinds of uncertainty, existential, systemic, relational, even if these were not always drawn together explicitly. It might be valuable to spend some time staying with and drawing out these differences as they showed themselves in the conversation, rather than moving too quickly to frame or resolve them.” Steven Segal
He went further, noting that the invitation to the dialogue had itself opened toward a plurality of uncertainties and risks, and particularly toward the question of whether frameworks like the WEF’s Global Risks Report may, in their very structure, limit our capacity to respond meaningfully. The framing shared at the opening, drawing on Oliver Burkeman’s reflection on finitude and the tendency to manage away the discomfort of not-knowing, he described as highlighting that our responses to uncertainty are not only technical or strategic but deeply existential. His proposal was to host a follow-up session focused on consolidating what began to emerge, staying with the different forms of uncertainty and the kinds of judgment, attunement, and action each seems to call forth.
Steven’s suggestion, read alongside Joan’s call for uncertainty infrastructure, opens what feels like a natural next conversation: a taxonomy of uncertainties not as a tidy list (which would reproduce the very pattern this dialogue critiqued) but as a plural grammar, and an inquiry into what forms of collective practice each form of uncertainty invites. The dialogue did not resolve these questions. It opened them.
Several threads opened that the dialogue could not work through, and several were raised only in the chat. They remain live for the series to return to.
A taxonomy of uncertainties: Steven Segal named objective and subjective; Joan Lurie distinguished “I’m not sure” from “I can’t predict.” Alain Wouters, in the chat, mentioned an unpublished drafting of seven kinds of uncertainty at work in scenario building. Is there a shared taxonomy worth constructing, and what would it make possible?
How do we decolonise the grasping for certainty? How might it relate to movements like The Great Simplification, or to reversing the “gains” of progress?
Is there a correlation between the known global disconnection from nature and a culturally specific fear of uncertainty? (Andrew Keast.) Do animist traditions carry an empathic relationship with uncertainty because it is intrinsic to the natural world?
The individual/collective dimension: indigenous societies often deal with anxiety collectively; North Atlantic cultures often treat it as individual pathology. How does this shape our attitudes toward uncertainty? (Laura Alfers, in the chat.)
Gifting, philanthropy, and universal basic income: if labour is becoming surplus to capitalism under AI, how should philanthropic gifting respond, and at what time horizons? (Alan Fowler.)
From safety to protection: what would it look like to shift institutional frames in climate-volatile contexts from safety-as-provision to protection-as-reciprocity? (Rossi Walter.)
Uncertainty infrastructure in organisations: what concrete rituals, practices, constraints, and processes would hold uncertainty at the scale of the collective, so that comfort with not-knowing does not fall on individuals alone? (Joan Lurie.)
Melissa Baird asked whether ritual could be understood as scenario planning or unveiling; Anthony loved the pairing of rituals and scenarios. The practical bridge between Ngoma ritual and organisational futures practice is worth working through.
Wax and Gold Glossary (The Impact Trust): https://glossary.impacttrust.org/
Roger Spitz and Olivier Desbiey, “The future of risk and insurability in the era of systemic disruption, unpredictability and artificial intelligence,” Journal of Operational Risk, 9 June 2025: https://www.risk.net/node/7961666
Annal Dhungana, “From scientific models to decisions: exploring uncertainty communication gaps between scientists and decision-makers,” Environment Systems and Decisions, Springer Nature.
Ania Hildebrandt shared research on the neuroscience of anxiety and uncertainty (Grupe & Nitschke, 2013, Nature Reviews Neuroscience)
Rossi Walter shared work by Dr Gillian Marcelle on homogeneity risk and Global South innovation
Nicola Robins, “Diviner Mind: How Organisations Can Learn from the Indigenous Science of Uncertainty.”
John Kay and Mervyn King, “Radical Uncertainty: Decision-Making Beyond the Numbers.”
Alain Wouters referenced Martin Buber’s “I and Thou,” Donella Meadows on leverage points, Francisco Varela on the embodied mind.
Tyson Yunkaporta, “Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World.”
This dialogue sat within The Impact Trust’s 2026 Wax and Gold Open Dialogue Series (“Sem ena Werq”), which works at the intersection of surface meaning and deeper truth on themes that shape collective action in a time of rupture. The threads opened here, uncertainty infrastructure at the organisational scale, the distinction between risk and uncertainty as languages, the meso-level capacity between individual conscience and macro policy, the reframing from safety to protection, and the politics of whose way of seeing risk is doing the seeing, continue to weave through the conversations that follow.
A follow on dialogue is planned for May 21st. See more about that here.
This dialogue continues the 2026 theme of wax and gold (“sem ena werq”), the Ethiopian concept where speech carries a surface meaning and a deeper truth beneath. The wax of risk management is thick: heatmaps, matrices, ranked lists, visible authoritative surfaces that look like knowledge and feel like control. The gold, this dialogue suggested, is not better models but a different relationship with not-knowing: one grounded in discernment, discipline, humility, and the recognition that the orders we navigate are more fractal than Euclidean, more like weather than engineering.