Nairobi, June 3 -- "I'd rather argue against a hundred idiots than have one agree with me," said Winston Churchill.

Does how you think matter more than what you think? Can the best match often be a mismatch? In management meetings, is having everyone nod their heads in agreement, being congruent, always a good thing? Do we lust after the beauty of certainty when many business decisions are ugly, ambiguous and clouded? Do we tend to make up stories, relying more on wishful thinking rather than evidence?

Is uncertainty valuable?

"It is wise to take admissions of uncertainty seriously", Daniel Kahneman noted, "but declarations of high confidence mainly tell you that an individual has constructed a coherent story in his mind, not necessari...