How to Build Uncertainty Tolerance on a Team
What is uncertainty tolerance?
You can build uncertainty tolerance on a team with practice, and the practice is smaller than most people expect. Uncertainty tolerance is how anxious or stuck a person feels when they cannot predict how something will turn out. People with low tolerance reach for ways to shrink the unknown: they recheck delegated work, research a purchase for a week, or wait to be told exactly how a new tool should be used. People with higher tolerance can act with part of the picture missing. This post is for L&D, HR, and team leads who watch a group stall on something new, and it covers two studies, the limits of each, and a short exercise any team can run.
Why does not knowing feel worse than bad news?
Not knowing carries its own cost, separate from the bad outcome. A 2016 study from University College London, published in Nature Communications, put 45 volunteers through a game in which they turned over rocks that might hide a snake. A snake meant a mildly painful electric shock to the hand, and the odds shifted as the game went on. According to UCL's press release, stress was highest when the chance of a shock was 50 percent and lowest when the outcome was certain, whether certain good or certain bad. The study's abstract reports that subjective stress, pupil size, and sweat response all followed the uncertainty.
One more result from that abstract is easy to miss. The people whose stress tracked the uncertainty most closely did better at the task, which the authors read as a sign that some stress helps learning when a threat is unpredictable. The aim is to keep that stress response from turning into freezing.
The limits are plain. The volunteers were a small group, the shocks were mild, and the setting was a lab game. The study says nothing about how a team reacts to a new software rollout.
What does low uncertainty tolerance look like when a team gets a new tool?
In a typical rollout, it looks like waiting. People hold off until a policy covers every case. They ask for one guaranteed-safe use before they try anything, or they run a single prompt, compare the answer to what they expected, and stop. Each is a way of shrinking the unknown before acting. It is a pattern facilitators describe, not a measured result.
It is also why AI adoption training at freestyle+ treats the stall as behavioral. A team that has never practiced acting without the full picture will not do it for the first time on a live project.
Does improv raise uncertainty tolerance?
One pair of experiments says it can, briefly. Researchers at the University of Michigan and Stony Brook University tested about 20 minutes of improv built on "yes, and" against a control group doing social tasks, and published the results in 2020 in Thinking Skills and Creativity. In the first experiment, the control group chose a friend to talk about, discussed a movie, and demonstrated physical actions. Both groups felt better and more comfortable with uncertainty afterward, but the improv group gained more in divergent thinking, meaning the ability to come up with many different answers. In the second experiment, the control group completed scripted social tasks, and only the improv group rose in positive emotion and comfort with uncertainty.
Here is what that does not show. This post draws on the University of Michigan press release and a summary of the paper, not the full text, so sample sizes and effect sizes are not reported here. The measures were taken right after a single session. The studies did not follow anyone for weeks, and they did not test a workplace. They support a narrow claim: a short stretch of improvising with a partner, where nobody can script the next line, moved how comfortable people felt with the unknown in that moment.
What does a practice session look like?
The freestyle+ position is that tolerance for uncertainty grows from repetitions in which nobody can prepare. One-Word Story is the usual first exercise in the "presence in uncertainty" part of a typical freestyle+ workshop. A team can run it in five minutes.
Split into groups of three or four. Each group tells a story one word at a time, with each person adding only the next word.
The leader goes first with a volunteer, and goes small: a short, slightly wrong, unpolished turn. People copy whatever the leader models.
Run it for two minutes. Nobody can plan ahead, so everyone is a little wrong early, and the group keeps going anyway.
Debrief with two questions: what did you do when you did not know where the story was going, and what helped you keep going?
Ask where the same pause shows up on the team's real work, then close with one small experiment: each person picks one task this week to start before every answer is in.
freestyle+ files this under Bravery, the first letter of the BOLD Mindset (Bravery, Optimism, Listening, Discovery). In the room, Bravery means surprising yourself and taking small risks without a script. The five-minute version is a sample. Tolerance builds the way any skill does, through repetition with other people.
Who is this not for?
This is not a treatment for clinical anxiety, and nothing cited here tests that. It also will not fix an unclear rollout. If people are hesitating because nobody has said what happens to the data they paste in, or because they worry about their jobs, a game will not answer that. Leaders have to answer it first, in plain words. Practice works on the part of the stall that remains once the real questions have real answers.
What is a good next step?
Run One-Word Story for three minutes at the start of your next team meeting and ask the two debrief questions. If you want a session built for a team that is meeting a new tool, start with a free 15-minute call and we will talk through what your team is facing.
