Thriving in uncertainty: resilience, meaning, and future thinking

Executive overview

Most people treat resilience as toughness — but the research points to five trainable skills that have nothing to do with grit. Dr. Gabriella Rosen Kellerman, chief innovation officer at BetterUp and co-author of Tomorrowmind, argues that meaning, optimism, and cognitive agility are the levers that matter.

When managers ask teams to pivot, they trigger a mattering crisis — employees question why their effort mattered. Recognising that risk, and actively witnessing effort, is the minimum standard for sustained motivation.

Leaders who build cognitive trust don't predict the future — they demonstrate they've spent serious time planning for it.

Creativity and the default mode network

• Openness to experience is the strongest individual predictor of creativity; it can be cultivated deliberately.
• Reading broadly before starting a new project fertilises the brain's default mode network — the source of non-conscious, associative ideas.
• Three networks drive creative insight: default mode (daydreaming), executive control (focused work), salience (attention switching).
• Constant digital connectivity keeps people locked in executive control mode, blocking the daydreaming that produces insight.
• A 24-hour technology Sabbath — or even a few tech-free hours — noticeably expands the richness of thinking.
• Inviting a divergent thinker into a brainstorm raises the ceiling of acceptable ideas for the whole group.
• Framing a creative challenge as a puzzle drives engagement; people often return with ideas days later.

Meaning, mattering, and recognition

• Meaning has three components: purpose (working toward something larger), coherence (integrity between actions and values), significance (a sense that one's existence matters).
• Mattering is the bare minimum: feeling that one's labour is seen and is not for naught. Its absence, at the extreme, maps to depression.
• Pivot moments are when mattering is most at risk — managers must actively narrate the value of the effort being left behind.
• Witnessing effort — separate from outcome — is what keeps employees motivated through change.
• Consistent recognition acts as a vaccine against mattering crises; it builds the trust that makes future pivots tolerable.

The five drivers of resilience

• Emotional regulation: resilience doesn't mean avoiding pain — it means metabolising it. Resilient people still feel the hard emotions; the difference is how they process them.
• Naming emotions precisely (e.g. using a feelings wheel to separate hurt from anger from fear) moves processing from the limbic system into the forebrain, dulling intensity.
• Optimism: optimistic people live longer, recover faster from serious illness, and have lower cardiac risk. Kellerman found her own optimism was being overridden by unhelpful paranoia, not absent.
• Cognitive agility: the ability to switch between the forest view (scanning for opportunity, adjusting strategy) and the trees view (focused execution).
• Cognitive agility is the resilience differentiator: in a tight spot, you need both focused effort and the flexibility to change approach when context shifts.
• Quarterly strategy reviews — not just annual planning — with cross-functional peers who surface signals from adjacent areas help maintain the forest view.
• Self-compassion and self-efficacy complete the five; all are trainable within a relatively short time.

Prospection as a leadership skill

• Prospection — the ability to plan for multiple future scenarios — is what builds cognitive trust in leaders during uncertainty.
• People don't expect leaders to predict the future; they expect evidence that leaders are spending serious time on scenario planning and resource allocation.
• The trust-breaching statement is "we just can't know" — the trust-building alternative is: here's what we know, here's what we don't, here's the scenarios we see, here's what we're doing.
• Prospection follows two phases: fast and optimistic (divergent, big-picture), then slow and realistic (planning, scenario mapping). Leaders who excel spend disproportionate time in the planning phase.
• Planning fatigue is real; building prospection capacity means doing more planning even after plans fall apart.
• Telling teams "we set the roadmap — and this will change" pre-empts mattering crises by normalising change as part of the job.

Post-traumatic growth and reframing

• The "new doors opening" exercise — writing about new opportunities emerging from difficulty once a week for a month — produces measurable gains in psychological recovery.
• The mechanism: deliberately reframing hard experiences as sources of new possibility shifts the story without minimising the loss.
• Kellerman's own rule: don't fix a story until ready. Observe, pick up signals, and let the narrative form organically rather than forcing premature conclusions.
• Tim Wilson's Redirect provides a broader framework for how people can intentionally retell their life stories to serve different outcomes.