You didn’t get to where you are by playing it safe. You got here because at some point you saw things others didn’t – a pattern, a possibility, a risk worth taking. The question is, when did you last feel that way?
The human brain is designed to keep us alive. Unfortunately, keeping us alive is a very stressful job, and it’s not getting easier. In fact, a recent global study found an “alarming increase in stress globally” and called it a major public health issue. Across 146 countries over 18 years, the likelihood of people reporting stress doubled.
Despite an ostensibly safer world, evolution has molded our brains into threat-detection and survival-optimization machines. This type of thinking controls our actions and emotions. On the surface, a weekly Zoom meeting might seem like the furthest thing from a life-or-death situation. But we have nearly the same brains as our hunter-gatherer ancestors who truly lived high-threat existences. Spreadsheets and KPIs are the new predators (at least to our reptilian brains).
So, why didn’t you speak out in that meeting? Your survival brain was telling you that it was a social risk that could lead to ostracization. Why did you eat that sleeve of Oreos? Your survival brain was telling you to consume high-calorie foods because you don’t know when the next successful hunt will be.
The effects compound when we take into consideration that the whole meeting is often made up of people thinking in survival mode. When a leadership team is collectively in a threat-response state, we get meetings made up of groupthink and conflict avoidance rather than expansive, innovative ideas.
A Cautionary Tale
It doesn’t take long to think of famous examples of organizations where this type of thinking had hugely detrimental effects. Take Nokia, which commanded over 40% of the global handset market in the early 2000s.
When the threat of smartphones appeared on the horizon, it was discounted and ignored internally. Leadership and middle managers alike were listening to their survival brains telling them it was safer to just go with the group who all seemed to agree that the problem wasn’t so serious. They watched as their ship slowly sank, all the way until they sold their phone business to Microsoft in 2013 for a fraction of its valuation just seven years earlier.
The leaders who built remarkable organizations didn’t do it by ignoring risk, or by managing it more carefully. They did it by remaining curious. Curious enough to ask questions that felt dangerous or naive, to sit with problems that had no answer, and to feel, occasionally, like a beginner. That quality – call it awe, wonder, intellectual humility – isn’t soft. It’s a strategic asset.
The irony is that as leaders climb, the very qualities their organizations reward – qualities such as decisiveness, confidence, execution – erode that curiosity that got them there in the first place.
How to Create the Conditions for Better Decisions
Loss aversion is a very powerful motivator, but it can propel us or imprison us. Legendary LA Dodgers manager Tommy Lasorda famously said, “I was a great manager because I hated losing more than I loved winning.”
Psychologist Daniel Kahneman’s research on loss aversion found that losses hit twice as hard, psychologically, as equivalent gains feel good. In other words, the fear of losing what you have is roughly twice as powerful as the excitement of gaining something new. So, is it any wonder that leaders default to protecting the present over building the future?
Leaders often have so much on their plate that it can be very hard to think beyond what’s right in front of them. The long-term, big-picture ideas seem idealistic when the stress of just keeping our heads above water is hard enough to handle. There is an important paradox here: The people who are best at keeping the lights on can be the least equipped to rewire the building to make it safe years down the line.
In other words, what looks like responsible pragmatism today is often just survival in a suit.
So, how do you actually work with the survival brain to cause that change rather than work against it? Two approaches stand out.
The first is psychological safety, a concept coined as far back as the ’50s by psychologist Carl Rogers and adapted for the workplace by Harvard researcher Amy Edmondson. The latter found that teams performing the best weren’t the ones with the smartest people, but the ones where people felt safe enough to speak honestly without fear of punishment or embarrassment. When leaders actively reward candor over comfort, they remove the social threat that keeps survival brains from speaking up.
The second is learning to distinguish between perceived risk and actual risk. The survival brain is simply not a reliable narrator. It treats a bold strategic pivot and a charging predator with the same distress. A simple discipline of asking, “How threatening does this feel?” alongside, “What is the actual probability this goes wrong?” can create just enough distance between instinct and decision to let clearer thinking in.
Neither of these is a magic fix. But together they create the conditions for something the survival brain rarely allows: A leadership team that can honestly assess reality, sit with uncertainty, and choose an intentional future over what is safe.
