The most expensive sentence in your organization is five words long. The CFO says it about the reorganization. The CHRO says it about the AI strategy. Team leads say it in 1:1 meetings.
“We will figure it out.”
It sounds like leadership confidence, but the brain reads it as a threat.
This is the gap that today’s HR teams miss. The conversation about retention, engagement, and productivity has gotten louder, but the diagnosis hasn’t gotten sharper. We are still pointing at workload, hybrid models, generational shifts, and burnout. None of those is wrong; however, they are downstream symptoms. The upstream cause is something HR has not yet operationalized as a measurable variable.
It is ambiguity. And there are four kinds of it, all of them carrying a cognitive tax that no engagement dashboard or organizational survey is currently tracking.
See also: 5 things to think about before bringing AI agents into the organization
The brain is a prediction machine
Modern neuroscience converges on a deceptively simple model of what the brain is for. It is a prediction machine that scans the environment, builds models of what comes next and uses those models to decide whether to relax or to mobilize. When prediction is possible, the prefrontal cortex stays online. Judgment, creativity, complex problem-solving, and the long view are all available. Alternatively, when prediction fails, when the brain cannot model what is coming, the system reroutes. Resources move away from the prefrontal cortex toward threat detection. The amygdala (the brain’s “fear center”) becomes more sensitive and the body braces.
Yale neuroscientist Amy Arnsten has spent decades documenting how vulnerable the prefrontal cortex is to even mild stress and uncertainty. The cells responsible for our highest-order thinking are the first to go offline when the environment becomes unpredictable. Bruce McEwen’s foundational work on allostatic load showed how the cumulative cost of chronic threat states accrues in the body, in cognition, and in behavior over time. Stephen Porges and others have mapped the autonomic nervous system’s role in how we read social and organizational signals for safety or risk.
The neuroscience is not contested, but what’s missing is its translation into how we design workplaces.
Here is the translation. When a leader says “we will figure it out,” they are speaking from a vantage point closer to the information and the decision authority. For them, the ambiguity isn’t extreme, because they have an idea (roughly) when it will resolve. The listener (normally a direct report, a skip-level report or an entire team that they manage) has neither the context, information nor the authority. So the listener’s brain fills the gap with threat prediction. Not because the listener is anxious by nature, but because that is what the brain does when it cannot model the future.
The leader walks away thinking they communicated reassurance, while the employee walks away with cognitive load they did not have an hour ago. Multiply that by every “we will figure it out” moment in a quarter, across an organization of thousands, and that is your ambiguity tax.
Most HR functions only track one form of ambiguity: role ambiguity. Engagement surveys ask whether employees understand what is expected of them, but there are three more, each with its own physiological signature and its own operational cost.
1. Role ambiguity
What am I actually responsible for? Where does my job end and another person’s begin? Whose call is this?
Cost signature: Duplicated work. Missed handoffs. Quiet quitting. Manager bottlenecking as employees route every decision upward because the decision rights are unclear.
2. Priority ambiguity
Of the 14 things on my plate, which one matters most this week? When everything is a priority, none of it is.
Cost signature: Missed deadlines. High performers over-rotate to the most visible work, while critical but quiet work goes undone. The “always on” pattern that gets misread as engagement and is actually overcompensation for not knowing what to drop.
3. Feedback ambiguity
Am I doing well? Am I in trouble? Where do I stand?
Cost signature: Anxiety masked as perfectionism. Employees who over-perform on visible deliverables and under-perform on important but quiet ones. Surprise attrition: the high performer who leaves with no warning signal because no one ever told them they were valued.
4. Future-state ambiguity
Is there a place for me here in six months? Where is this organization actually going? What does the AI strategy mean for my role?
Cost signature: Top performer flight, because high performers are the most strategic readers of organizational signals and they leave first. Disengagement that no perk can fix. The AI anxiety conversation is happening in private channels and not in the building.
What the engagement dashboard was not built to see
The standard engagement survey asks about role clarity and rates leadership communication from the organization’s executive team and direct managers. It rarely asks about priority clarity in any rigorous way. It almost never asks about feedback ambiguity in the specific form that matters. It usually displaces future-state ambiguity entirely, treating it as out of scope or too politically sensitive to name.
That is the operational problem. Most organizations have not built an optimized infrastructure to track the costs of ambiguity and the language of “we will figure it out.”
I have watched the same pattern across Fortune 500 culture work. The engagement score is acceptable, but the exit interviews tell a different story. Middle managers are exhausted; high performers are quietly interviewing; but the executive team is confident that the culture is solid because the dashboard is green. However, the dashboard was not designed to measure what is actually leaving the building.
When we piloted Navigating Ambiguity™ inside Warner Bros. Discovery, the first revelation was not that ambiguity existed. Everyone knew that. The revelation was that ambiguity had types, that each type had a different intervention, and that leaders had been treating all four as one problem to be solved with more communication. More communication is not the answer. More precise communication is.
The 3 moves CHROs can make this quarter
Three moves, in order of how quickly they return value.
1. Audit your engagement instrument against the four-type framework: Take whatever platform or tool that you currently use. Look at the items related to clarity. Identify which of the four ambiguity types each item touches. Most organizations will discover that they cover role ambiguity reasonably, touch priority ambiguity loosely, ignore feedback ambiguity and avoid future-state ambiguity entirely. Adding two well-designed items per missing type can drastically change the type of data that you will receive from the survey. You cannot intervene on what you cannot measure.
2. Treat clarity as an operational metric, not a leadership virtue: “Comfort with ambiguity” appears on every leadership job description in the country. However, almost no leadership development program teaches it. The skill that needs developing is not the leader’s personal tolerance for ambiguity. It is their ability to reduce ambiguity for their team without pretending to know what they do not know. The Navigating Ambiguity™ framework calls this clarity under uncertainty: the leader’s ability to name what they can, name what they cannot, and provide a predictable rhythm of communication. It is teachable, but it’s just not currently being taught.
3. Replace “We will figure it out” with a sentence that does the same emotional work without the cognitive cost: The leader’s instinct is right. They are trying to express that the situation is manageable and that the listener is not alone in it. The phrase that does that work without triggering prediction failure is closer to this:
“Here is what I know. Here is what I do not know yet. Here is when you will know more.”
It takes three sentences instead of one. It is the difference between a workforce that braces and a workforce that breathes.
The real variance
People think that “culture” boils down to the values on the wall in the lobby, or how All-Hands meetings open. In actuality, culture is not what you say, but what the nervous system learns to expect.
The most successful HR functions of the next five years will not be the ones who run the most programs. They will be the ones who name and measure the cognitive load their organizations are silently producing. They will treat ambiguity the way finance treats variance: as a number you can move, not a vibe you can spin.
The next time you hear yourself say “we will figure it out,” pause. Ask yourself what you actually know, what you do not, and when your team will know more. If you cannot answer all three, you have just identified the work.
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