A Map for the Fog

THIS ARTICLE IS BASED ON THE BOOK Dr. Alex Zolotov, Ph.D. — Triadic Intelligence: Designing Reality With the Lens Triad. A systems-based approach to thinking, transformation, and reality design. Available on Amazon.

Marina woke up at 4:12 a.m.

No alarm. No reason.

She just opened her eyes and immediately remembered yesterday’s email from HR: “Next quarter the company is moving to a new AI-based operating model. Details to follow.”

Details to follow.

Three words. No one said she would be let go. No one said she wouldn’t. And that was exactly what made it unbearable.

Before morning she had rewritten her résumé three times in her head, held an imaginary conversation with her boss, calculated how many months her savings would last, and read twelve articles about which professions will disappear first. When the alarm finally rang, she felt as if she had already lived through that entire hard quarter. Although in reality nothing had happened yet.

We do not fear the unknown. We fear the unmapped.

This article is about how to build that map. Not in order to eliminate uncertainty completely (that is impossible and, as we will see, not even necessary), but in order to stop mistaking fog for an abyss.

What Uncertainty Is

In everyday speech we call “uncertainty” anything that gives us the feeling of “who knows what will happen.” But behind that word there are at least four different states, and confusing them means treating the wrong illness.

Risk. We do not know the outcome, but we know the probabilities: a roll of the dice, an insured event. As early as 1921 the economist Frank Knight distinguished “measurable risk” from “true uncertainty,” which cannot be expressed as a percentage (MIT News). Uncertainty in the narrow sense. We know neither the outcome nor the probabilities: how will my profession change in five years? Ambiguity. There is enough information, but it can be read in different ways: the boss says, “We need to talk.” Is it a promotion or a layoff? In 1961 Daniel Ellsberg showed that people systematically avoid situations with unknown probabilities, even when it costs them (Ellsberg paradox). Unknown unknowns. We do not even suspect that we don’t know something. This is where “black swans” come from: rare, unpredictable events with enormous consequences (Investopedia).

Fig. 1. The uncertainty ladder: the higher the step, the less calculation helps and the more resilience matters

One more distinction will become central for us. Uncertainty can be reducible: it shrinks when we gather information, ask, or test. And it can be irreducible: no amount of reading will tell you what the weather will be like in a month or how the market will behave. Most of the human suffering connected with uncertainty grows out of a single mistake: we try to think through what can only be insured against or endured.

Why “Not Knowing” Hurts More Than “Knowing the Worst”

In 2016, researchers at University College London ran an experiment in which participants played a computer game where snakes hid under some rocks, and a “bite” came with a mild electric shock. The greatest stress was felt not by those who knew for sure they would be shocked, but by those whose chance was about 50% (UCL; Nature Communications). Put simply: uncertainty turned out to be harder to bear than inevitable pain. Every psychotherapist has seen this in the consulting room dozens of times.

EXAMPLES FROM PRACTICE • A woman waits nine days for biopsy results. When the diagnosis turns out to be serious, she says: “Strangely enough, I feel relieved. At least now I know what I’m fighting.” • A man cannot “let go” for years after a divorce, not because he still loves her, but because he never understood why it ended. The unanswered question hurts more than the loss. • The parents of an adult son who has stopped staying in touch describe their nights as “worse than any bad news.”

Psychology has described several mechanisms behind these stories. Intolerance of uncertainty is a stable trait, a tendency to treat unclear situations as “bad” and to try to avoid them; Michel Dugas and colleagues showed that it lies at the heart of chronic worry (The Cognitive Behaviour Therapist), and Nicholas Carleton proposed that fear of the unknown may be “one fear to rule them all” (PubMed). The need for cognitive closure, described by Arie Kruglanski, is the desire for a firm answer, any firm answer, rather than remaining in ambiguity (Springer); hence hasty decisions and a readiness to believe the worst just to avoid living in “maybe.” Psychological entropy: Jacob Hirsh and colleagues proposed that anxiety is the subjective experience of disorder in the perception–action system, and the more equally likely options there are, the higher the tension (ERIC). Anticipatory anxiety: uncertainty about a future threat deprives us of the ability to avoid it or soften its impact, and it is precisely this that produces anxiety (PubMed).

A PSYCHOTHERAPIST’S COMMENT Notice that none of these mechanisms says uncertainty is “bad.” They say it becomes hard when uncertainty meets low tolerance and a lack of resources. Those are three different levers. That is the first hint of the triadic approach.

Why Now

Humanity has always lived with uncertainty: harvests, wars, epidemics. But three circumstances make the 21st century special.

Uncertainty has become an environment rather than an event. Ulrich Beck described the “risk society,” in which the main threats are produced by civilization itself (Risk society), and Zygmunt Bauman called our era “liquid modernity,” where anxiety and insecurity become a background condition (British Journal of Social Work). The language of management has made it official: the acronym VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity) dates from the U.S. Army War College in 1987 (VUCA), and the futurist Jamais Cascio proposed a harsher frame, BANI: brittle, anxious, nonlinear, incomprehensible (Medium). Information has stopped reassuring us. Uncertainty used to be treated with knowledge: find out, calm down. Today there is so much information that it becomes a source of fog in itself. The twelve articles Marina read that night did not reduce her uncertainty. They multiplied it.

Add one more effect. Eldar Shafir and Sendhil Mullainathan showed that scarcity (of money, time, or connections) eats up “mental bandwidth,” leaving fewer resources for planning and decisions (APA Monitor). Uncertainty works the same way: it takes up space in the mind before anything has happened.

And it is not only a private matter. Young people postpone marriage, children, and buying a home because “who knows what will happen.” A company announces a “reorganization” with no details, and within two months the best employees, the ones with the most options, are gone. A couple lives for years in “maybe we’ll move” mode, and life is put on pause for a decision that is never made. The same thing repeats everywhere: uncertainty paralyzes us not when there is a lot of it, but when we have nothing to hold it with.

The Triadic Intelligence Approach

Triadic Intelligence starts from a simple idea: any complex phenomenon becomes understandable when it is viewed from several sides at once. Not from one “correct” side, but from three interconnected ones. We use three lenses.

MIE — Matter, Information, Energy. What is the situation made of? Where does it live: in resources and the body, in knowledge and meaning, or in emotions and motivation?

WWH — What, Whither, How. What is happening now? Where am I heading? By what means am I getting there?

SFD — Structure, Function, Development. What holds everything up? How does it work right now? How is it changing and growing?

Fig. 2. The three lenses of Triadic Intelligence form a cube of 27 “windows” through which any life situation can be viewed

Each lens on its own gives a useful but incomplete view. When the lenses are stacked on top of one another (hence the name, the Stacking Lens Triad Method), we get a cube of 27 cells. For example: “Matter — What — Structure” asks how stable my basic financial and physical foundation is; “Information — How — Function” asks whether I can apply the knowledge and skills I need right now; “Energy — Whither — Development” asks whether my motivation keeps its direction when circumstances change.

The key concept of the method is harmony: a system is stable when its components are in balance and none suppresses the others. When Information grows at the expense of Energy and Matter, a person “thinks instead of living.” When Energy swallows everything, a person acts impulsively. When Matter becomes the only support, life turns into accumulation without meaning.

TRIADIC INSIGHT Classical psychology asks: “Why are you anxious?” Classical management asks: “What is the probability of the risk?” Triadic Intelligence asks differently: “What is your uncertainty made of, where is it leading you, and how is it built?” As long as uncertainty is “fog,” nothing can be done with it. Once it has coordinates, it can be worked with.

Three Lenses Turned on Uncertainty Itself

MIE: Three strategies — reduce, insure, endure

This is the central idea of the article. Each element of the MIE triad corresponds to its own way of dealing with uncertainty.

Fig. 3. The strategy triad: each element of MIE is responsible for its own way of working with uncertainty

Information — reduce. For reducible uncertainty. Find out, ask, check, try it on a small scale. Marina can talk to her manager, find three colleagues who went through a similar reorganization, take a short course on working with AI. Each of these actions literally shrinks the unknown.

Matter — insure. For irreducible uncertainty. If you cannot know the future, you can prepare for its different versions: a financial cushion, a backup plan, a second skill, supportive relationships. A sailor does not know whether there will be a storm. But he takes an anchor and a supply of water on board.

Energy — endure. For the residual uncertainty that always remains. This is the ability to stay in “I don’t know” without panic: regulating anxiety, leaning on values, bodily steadiness, sleep, face-to-face contact. Not dispelling the fog, but learning to walk through it calmly.

Most people’s main mistake is an asymmetry of strategies. We invest almost all our energy in “reduce”: we read, google, ruminate, replay scenarios. And almost nothing in “insure” and “endure.” That night Marina spent four hours on “reduce.” But none of the articles she read could tell her what her company would decide. That uncertainty was irreducible, at least until the next quarter. What she needed was not more information, but a safety cushion and the ability to fall asleep.

You cannot think your way through what can only be insured against. You cannot insure yourself against what can only be endured.

WWH and SFD: What exactly is unclear, and at which level

The second lens shows what our uncertainty is actually about. An unclear “What” means I don’t understand where I am: is this burnout or depression, a relationship crisis or temporary fatigue? An unclear “Whither” means I don’t understand where I’m going: what do I want, and which goal is worth the effort? An unclear “How” means I know where I want to go but not how to get there. When forecasting is impossible, our compass is not plans but values. If “Whither” is defined by values (“I want to do work where I’m useful to people”), then an unclear “How” becomes a solvable task rather than an existential threat. Plans break in the fog. Values do not.

The third lens shows at what level of the system the uncertainty lives. It can be structural (the foundations themselves are shaky: housing, health, income), functional (it is unclear how current processes are working: am I coping with my job?) or developmental (the trajectory is unclear: who will I be in five years if the world changes faster than I can learn?). The hardest is structural, because when the foundation shakes it is hard to think about development. The most common in our time is developmental.

The Uncertainty Hologram: Strength and Clarity

Now let us put everything together. If we lay the three lenses on top of one another, we get the cube of 27 cells that we call the uncertainty hologram. Just as a hologram shows an object from every side, this model shows a life situation from every side at once: where a person has support and where there is fog. Each cell is one concrete question about life. The cell “Matter — How — Structure” asks: what material reserves can I lean on? For Marina, this is her financial cushion. The cell “Information — Whither — Development” asks: do I understand where my field is heading?

Rate two things, not one

Here lies the central methodological refinement. It is tempting to rate each cell on a single scale of “how good is it” and treat the gap as uncertainty. But this mixes up two very different states. “I don’t have much money” is a weakness. “I don’t know whether my money will last” is uncertainty. The first can be perfectly clear: a person knows exactly how much is in the account and understands that it is not enough. The second can concern even a strength: the money may well be there, but it is unclear how long it will last. So every cell gets two ratings: strength (how well things are going in this area) and clarity (how sure I am of my rating, and whether I understand what is going on here). Uncertainty is a lack of clarity, not a lack of strength.

Marina’s two cells show why this matters. Her financial cushion is small: weakness. But she knows exactly how much she has and what she spends: there is almost no fog. She does not need to find anything out; she needs to act. Her skills for working with AI are probably decent, since she learns new software fairly easily. But she has never tried a real work task with AI: strength in the fog. She does not need to worry; she needs to check. With a single score both cells would look almost equally “average.” Two scales show that they need completely different kinds of help.

Four states of a cell

Combining the two scales gives a simple map of four states.

Fig. 4. The strength–clarity matrix: four states of a cell and the strategy that suits each

Foundation (strong and clear): I know this works; protect it and lean on it. Known problem (weak but clear): I know it is bad and why; act according to a plan. Untested support (strong but unclear): it seems fine, but I am not sure; check it. Fog (weak and unclear): it looks bad, and it is unclear how bad; reduce, insure, endure.

A PSYCHOTHERAPIST’S COMMENT With a single-score rating, a known problem and fog look equally “bad.” But they are handled differently. A known problem needs a plan. Fog first needs clarity. A person who builds a plan in the fog builds it on sand. And a person who keeps endlessly gathering information about a known problem is simply postponing action under the guise of analysis. In practice this is very common: “I need to think about it a little more” often means “I am afraid to start.”

Reducibility: how much of the fog can be cleared

Not all fog is the same. One kind of unclarity can be cleared in an evening: make a call, ask, try. Another will not be cleared by any amount of reading: nobody knows exactly what the job market will look like in two years. To tell these cases apart, ask yourself: “What share of this unclarity can I clear up myself, through my own actions, in the next one to three months?” The answer sorts the fog into two parts: the reducible part belongs to the “reduce” strategy; the rest belongs to “insure” and “endure.”

For Marina, the fog around her AI skills is almost entirely reducible: one real project with AI will clear it. The fog around the job market in her field is almost entirely irreducible: what happens to the market in two years hardly depends on her. Reading even more about the market is useless. She needs to prepare: a cushion, a backup plan, a second skill. This is exactly where Marina spent most of her energy that night, and exactly where reading helped least.

Priority: the vital few

Twenty-seven cells is a lot, and working on all of them at once is impossible and unnecessary. In complex systems, the behavior of the whole is usually determined by a few key points. Out of 27 cells, we choose the three to five most important. A cell is critical when three things come together: there is a lot of fog in it, it matters greatly for the main question, and a change there would move many other things. The first condition is essential. A cell with little fog may be very important, but it is not a zone of uncertainty; it is a known problem, and it needs a plan, not an investigation.

The hologram also reveals contradictions (solid Matter alongside completely foggy Energy: the money is there, but it is unclear what to keep living for) and links: how fog in one cell spreads to its neighbors. Marina noticed that when she thinks her profession may disappear, she loses the desire to work at all. The link was unexpected for her; she had thought she was simply tired. The conclusion: it is better to start working on motivation not with “finding meaning” but with clarifying the future of her profession. Then the second cell will begin to clear up by itself.

Three Questions About Balance, Coping, and Load

The hologram shows where the fog is. Three further questions look at the person who is standing in it: are my forces balanced, am I coping the right way, and how heavy does this feel to me?

Is my attention balanced? Harmony of the MIE profile

When you feel “stuck in your head” (you think, read, and analyze a lot while your energy and actions keep shrinking), the problem is often a skew in attention. A simple exercise shows it. Take 20 tokens (coins, matches, or numbers on paper) and divide them into three piles according to where your attention and energy have gone in recent weeks: to Matter (money, body, sleep, household, practical tasks), to Information (thoughts, reading, analysis, plans), and to Energy (feelings, rest, socializing, whatever gives you strength). Then compare this with the profile your situation actually needs. It does not have to be equal: during an illness a person needs “heavy” Matter; during studies, Information.

Marina put most of her tokens on Information. Her attention had been pulled into thinking, while she sleeps badly and her cushion is thin. She and her psychologist decided that she needed more grounding and strength and less mental replaying. A month later her tokens were spread almost exactly the way the situation required.

Am I coping the right way? Harmony of the three strategies

This is, in our view, one of the most useful applications of the method. It compares two profiles: what the situation needs, and where your energy actually goes. The first comes from the hologram: how much of the fog is reducible, how much can be insured, how much simply has to be lived through. The second comes from honesty: recall the last three days and estimate how much time went into reducing, insuring, and enduring.

Fig. 5. What the situation needs and what Marina does: need, effort now, and effort a month later

Marina’s picture was lopsided. Almost twice as much effort as needed went into “reduce”: reading, thinking, replaying scenarios. “Insure” was almost abandoned: half an hour over her budget in three days. Interestingly, her “endure” was in order: the walks and her friend were working. The main problem was not that she could not calm down, but that she was preparing for the future by reading instead of by preparing. A month later she did not think about her situation any less. She simply started saving money and updated her résumé. And the match between what she did and what the situation needed rose from poor to excellent.

How heavy does it feel? The load of uncertainty

Two people in the same situation experience it completely differently. So we separate the objective uncertainty of the situation from its subjective weight, which depends on three things. The first is how much fog there really is in the critical cells. The second is intolerance of uncertainty, a personal trait that can be measured with the widely used IUS-12 questionnaire (Carleton et al., 2007): how hard it is for a person to bear “I don’t know” in general. The third is coping resources: people to lean on, reserves of money and time, and the skills of calming down, sleeping, and switching off.

The three act together: the same fog is heavier for someone who tolerates it poorly, and lighter for someone with more support. This reveals the main point: anxiety has three levers, not one. You can reduce the uncertainty (Information), increase tolerance (Energy), or increase resources (Matter). And because the levers multiply rather than add, a small improvement in each gives more than a big effort on just one.

Fig. 6. Three levers for lightening the load: each one works, but together they give a multiplied effect

Marina’s load was in the red zone: moderate-to-heavy fog met high intolerance and almost no support (“I have a friend, but it feels awkward to discuss work with her”; “a cushion for three months”; “I don’t sleep, I can’t stop my thoughts”). No single effort (reading, meditation, or money) could solve the problem. But small steps in all three directions cut the load several times over. An honest caveat: intolerance of uncertainty is a trait, and it usually changes more slowly than within a month. But it can be trained: even brief programs reduce it noticeably (Psychological Medicine).

How dangerous is the fog? Fog meeting vulnerability

The last question connects two things: how much fog there is overall, and how vulnerable the person is to it. Vulnerability has five components: how much damage the fog would do if it persisted, how much it “infects” other areas of life and loved ones, how far it has led to analysis paralysis and procrastination, how hard it is to regain clarity alone, and how much the person has lost control over time, attention, and choices. The risk is high only when both are high. A person moving to a new city for an interesting job faces a lot of fog, but with a secure job, housing, and supportive loved ones this is curiosity, not a threat. Danger arises when a lot of fog meets high vulnerability.

LINK WITH THE AGENCY INDEX™ In the end, all of these questions serve one outcome: preserving agency, a person’s ability to remain the author of their own life. High danger from the fog is almost always accompanied by a drop in agency: decisions start being made not by the person but by their anxiety.

An End-to-End Case: Marina, From Fog to Map

Marina’s case is illustrative. It is built on typical patterns that often come up in practice and serves as a demonstration of the method, not a description of a real client. The whole path has six steps: formulate the question, fill in the hologram, find the critical cells, take stock of the indicators, make a plan, and check the result a month later.

Step 1. The focal question. Marina could have asked: “What will happen to me?” But such a question leads nowhere: it can be answered endlessly, and every answer will breed new anxiety. Together with her psychologist she formulates a more concrete one: “How do I get through the next quarter of the reorganization while keeping my income, my health, and my self-respect?” A good focal question already reduces uncertainty: it turns “everything” into “this.” It has a time frame, a goal (to get through, not to “guess the future”), and three supports worth keeping: income is Matter, health is body and strength, self-respect is Energy and values. Marina is no longer asking what the company will decide. She is asking what she herself can do.

Step 2. The hologram. Marina rates all 27 cells for strength and clarity. To make it easier, she first “translates” each cell into the language of her own life. The whole thing takes about forty minutes, in three layers following the SFD lens.

Fig. 7. Marina’s hologram in three layers: color shows the level of fog; critical cells are outlined

The main point is visible at first glance: the lower layers, “Structure” and “Function,” are mostly calm, while the “Development” layer is almost entirely in fog, especially the “Whither” column. Marina’s foundation is in order (experience, health, current income), and the unclarity lives in the future: where the profession, the market, and her own motivation are heading. Notice also her financial cushion: it is green even though it is small. This is not fog but a known problem. Marina knows exactly that the money will last three months, and it is precisely this clarity that makes the problem solvable. You can build the same kind of hologram for yourself with the web tool at alexz.us.

Step 3. Critical cells. Four cells stand out, all with a lot of fog, high importance, and high leverage: where the profession is heading, what to keep working for, her AI work skills, and the job market in her field. Two cells were deliberately left off the list. “Role and tasks for the quarter” is also fog, but highly reducible: it will most likely clear after one conversation with her manager, so it is worth watching rather than turning into a task. And the financial cushion is important, but it has no fog: nothing to find out, only to do. One more observation: three of the four critical cells lie in the “Development” layer and in the “Whither” column. Marina’s fog is the fog of the future and of direction. Her present is holding.

Step 4. The indicators before the work begins. Her attention was pulled into Information, with a shortfall in Matter and Energy. Her coping was lopsided: far too much “reduce,” almost no “insure.” The load was in the overload zone: moderate fog met high intolerance and low resources. The danger from the fog was high, with stagnation and loss of agency the most worrying components.

WHAT THE INDICATORS SAY TOGETHER The foundation is fine, the future is in fog, and energy is going to the wrong place. She needs to think about the future less and prepare for it more. Hence the plan.

Step 5. A plan on three levels. For each critical cell Marina sketches a micro-action (something that can be done today), a mindset shift (a new thought that supports the action), and a long-term vision. Action alone, without a change in thinking, is quickly abandoned. A thought alone, without action, remains a good intention. And without a long-term vision, it is unclear where all of this leads.

Cell	Micro-action (today)	Mindset shift	Long-term vision
Where the profession is heading	Write to three colleagues who went through a similar reorganization; ask her manager for 15 minutes	“I don’t need to know everything; I need to know the next step”	A map of two or three scenarios for how her role might develop
What to keep working for	Spend 10 minutes writing down the moments at work when she was happy	“Values are a compass when there is no map”	Define her “Whither” through values, not a job title
AI work skills	Do one real work project with AI within a week	“Checking instead of worrying”	A personal six-month learning plan
Job market	Update her profile and résumé: one hour	“I am preparing for several versions of the future”	A second source of income or an adjacent skill
Financial cushion	Set up an automatic transfer of 10% of income from the next paycheck	“A cushion is not pessimism; it is freedom”	A six-month reserve

Look at how the plan maps onto the triad of strategies. The conversations with colleagues and the manager, and the trial project, are “reduce.” The résumé, the automatic savings, and the second skill are “insure.” Writing down the happy moments at work is “endure”: it gives her grounding in her values while there is no answer, and an evening walk without her phone helps her sleep. And there is not a single “read some more” item in the plan.

Step 6. One month later. The reorganization has still not been completed. Objectively, the situation at the company has barely changed. But Marina fills in the hologram and the questionnaires again. Where the fog was reducible, it receded: after three conversations with colleagues and a meeting with her manager, the future of the profession became much clearer, and after two projects with AI the skills cell cleared almost completely. The job market stayed foggy, and that is normal: this uncertainty is irreducible, but it is now insured. Her tolerance of uncertainty rose, her support grew (she talked to her husband and colleagues), her reserves began to build, and she sleeps seven hours.

Fig. 8. Before and after: how Marina’s key indicators changed over one month

The most striking changes are in the match between her effort and her needs and in the load. The average level of fog fell far more modestly. This confirms the main idea: the gain came not so much from “more clarity” as from a different relationship with the unclarity that remains. Marina still works at the same company, and the decision has still not been made. But she sleeps. She talked to her manager, did two projects with AI, and set aside her first 10% of income. In the mornings she no longer opens articles about the professions that will disappear first. Instead: five minutes of the Express Hologram and one action for the day. The fog has not gone anywhere. But she now has a map.

TRIADIC INSIGHT Uncertainty cannot be defeated; it can only be broken down. Once the fog is split into the reducible, the non-reducible, and the residual, each part gets its own tool: knowledge, reserves, resilience. And then a person stops spending their whole life trying to guess the future and starts preparing for it.

The Express Hologram: Five Minutes a Day

The full 27-cell hologram is an in-depth diagnosis, worth doing once a month or at a moment of serious crisis. But uncertainty does not live once a month. It wakes up with us every morning. For daily work we offer a short version that drops the third lens (SFD) and keeps only the intersection MIE × WWH: nine cells instead of twenty-seven. That is enough to see in five minutes where the fog is today and to choose one action. Each cell has one simple question, and each is rated only for clarity: “how clear is this to me today?”

Fig. 9. The Express Hologram: nine MIE × WWH cells, one question in each, with Marina’s second week as the example

	What: where am I now	Whither: where am I going	How: by what means
Matter	What resources do I have right now: money, time, body?	What resources will my destination require?	What physical step can I take today?
Information	Do I understand what is really going on: where are the facts and where are the assumptions?	Am I clear about what I want and what matters to me?	Do I know how to act: is there a plan and the knowledge I need?
Energy	How do I feel: how much strength and how much anxiety?	Do I want to go there: is my motivation alive?	Will I have the strength to endure the process, and where do I get it?

THE FIVE-MINUTE PROTOCOL 1. Focus (30 seconds). In one sentence: what is causing the most unclarity today? 2. Nine ratings (2 minutes). Quickly, without deliberating, rate clarity in each cell. The first number that comes to mind is usually the most honest. 3. Cell of the day (30 seconds). Find the cell with the lowest clarity. If there are several, choose the one that most affects your focus. 4. Strategy (1 minute). Can this be found out? Reduce. Can it not be found out, but can I prepare for it? Insure. Does it simply remain unknown? Endure. 5. One action (1 minute). Write down one concrete step for today, no longer than ten to fifteen minutes.

On Marina’s second-week morning, the focus was “What will happen to my role after the reorganization?” The most foggy cell was “Information — Whither.” This can be found out, so the strategy was reduce, and the action was to write to her manager and ask for 15 minutes before Friday. Five minutes in the morning gave her not anxiety, but a plan for the day. Over a week her overall fog drifted steadily downward, with one small rise on Friday, when the company announced another meeting “with no details.” What matters is not that the fog sometimes rises, but the overall direction.

The express version connects to the full one simply. Daily: the Express Hologram, five minutes, one action. Weekly: look at which cells most often became the “cell of the day.” If the same cell repeats three or four times, the fog there is not situational but systemic. Monthly, or when thick fog lasts three days in a row: the full 27-cell hologram, which shows at which level (structure, function, or development) the recurring unclarity lives.

A PSYCHOTHERAPIST’S COMMENT The strength of the express version lies not in precision but in regularity. Five minutes in the morning turn uncertainty from a background that “is just there” into an object you meet face to face. Within a week, many clients notice that the procedure itself lowers anxiety: unclarity that has an address is less frightening than unclarity without one.

Applying the Method in Different Areas

Management and organizations. A manager announcing a reorganization can use the same triad. Reduce: give employees everything that is already known, plus a timeline for when the rest will be known. Insure: guarantees, transition terms, clear criteria. Endure: space for conversation and an acknowledgment that unclarity is hard. Teams endure bad news better than silence. Dave Snowden’s Cynefin framework proposes a “probe, sense, respond” scheme for complex situations (SFiO); in our terms, this is the “reduce” strategy in small, safe steps.

Family and relationships. A couple who have lived for years in “maybe we’ll move” mode can agree on three things: the date by which the decision will be made (reduce), the steps they will take in any case (insure), and how they will support each other while there is no answer (endure). The date alone already lifts part of the fog: “maybe, someday” turns into “we’ll decide by March 1.”

Psychotherapy. For a client with high intolerance of uncertainty, the strength–clarity matrix is a visual tool. It often turns out that a significant share of the “catastrophes” are untested supports: strengths the person is simply unsure of. One checking action sometimes gives more than months of reflection. And the IUS-12 questionnaire, repeated a month later, shows the client that “I’m just an anxious person” is not a verdict but a trait that changes.

One Model, Three Topics

Psychological charge and uncertainty are closely linked. Uncertainty works as a constant background leak of charge: unclarity about “Whither” dampens Energy, while the attempt to “think everything through” overloads Information. And to a discharged person any fog seems thicker, because resources are largely the charge itself. Digital sins (information obesity, the endless feed, anxious scrolling) make the fog denser; the twelve articles Marina read that night are exactly such a digital leak, disguised as the “reduce” strategy. Together, the three articles describe one system: charge is the fuel, uncertainty is the environment, digital sins are the leaks.

Limitations of the Method

The ratings are subjective. They are not measurements but structured judgments. Their value is that they make intuition visible and comparable over time, not in their “precision.” The output is a consensus, not a single rating. For organizations and complex cases, it is worth combining several views: experts, the person and their loved ones, even independent assessments from different AI models. This triadic consensus does not deliver “the truth,” but it reduces the randomness of a single view. The model simplifies reality. Its job is to show direction and logic, not to predict exact outcomes, and its thresholds are guidelines that still need refinement on real data. The method does not replace professional help. If uncertainty is accompanied by pronounced anxiety, insomnia, or thoughts of hopelessness, the hologram is a good reason to talk to a psychotherapist, not a substitute for that conversation.

Pause for a Minute

Answer three questions for yourself.

1. Which uncertainty in your life currently takes up the most space in your head?

2. Which part of it is reducible: what could you find out or check this week? And which part is irreducible, and what could you prepare for?

3. If you honestly divided your efforts between “reduce,” “insure,” and “endure,” which of the three strategies would turn out to be the most neglected?

Write down your answers. Perhaps this is where your map begins.

What can be done next. The web tool at alexz.us, an interactive hologram that builds a three-dimensional cube with a heat map and suggests interventions, is the next step of this work, together with the Express Hologram on your phone, a clarity journal for monthly re-testing, a team hologram that shows where uncertainty is organizational and where it is personal, and calibration against the IUS-12 questionnaire and anxiety scales for a more rigorous test of the method.

We cannot choose whether there will be fog in our lives. But we can choose whether we will have a map.

Further Reading

1. Zolotov, A. Triadic Intelligence: Designing Reality With the Lens Triad. — Amazon

2. Knight, F. H. (1921). Risk, Uncertainty and Profit. Overview: Explained: Knightian uncertainty. — MIT News

3. Ellsberg, D. (1961). Risk, ambiguity, and the Savage axioms. Quarterly Journal of Economics. — Ellsberg paradox

4. Taleb, N. N. The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. — Investopedia

5. de Berker, A. O., et al. (2016). Computations of uncertainty mediate acute stress responses in humans. Nature Communications. — Nature

6. Dugas, M. J., et al. Further development of the intolerance of uncertainty model of GAD. The Cognitive Behaviour Therapist. — Cambridge

7. Carleton, R. N., Norton, P. J., & Asmundson, G. J. G. (2007). Fearing the unknown: A short version of the Intolerance of Uncertainty Scale. Journal of Anxiety Disorders. — PubMed

8. Carleton, R. N. (2016). Fear of the unknown: One fear to rule them all? Journal of Anxiety Disorders. — PubMed

9. Kruglanski, A. W. Need for cognitive closure. — Springer

10. Hirsh, J. B., Mar, R. A., & Peterson, J. B. (2012). Psychological entropy: A framework for understanding uncertainty-related anxiety. Psychological Review. — ERIC

11. Grupe, D. W., & Nitschke, J. B. (2013). Uncertainty and anticipation in anxiety. Nature Reviews Neuroscience. — PubMed

12. Beck, U. (1986). Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. — Risk society

13. Bauman, Z. Liquid Modernity; review in the British Journal of Social Work. — Oxford Academic

14. VUCA: volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity. — VUCA

15. Cascio, J. BANI: brittle, anxious, nonlinear, incomprehensible. — Medium

16. Mullainathan, S., & Shafir, E. Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much. Overview. — APA Monitor

17. Snowden, D. Complexity and Cynefin. — SFiO

18. Single-session online training reduces intolerance of uncertainty and improves mental health in emerging adults. Psychological Medicine. — Cambridge

Learn more about the approach in the book by Dr. Alex Zolotov, Ph.D., “Triadic Intelligence: Designing Reality With the Lens Triad”