Conviction, narratives, ambivalence, and constructive doubt: Reflections on six expert commentaries

Abstract

At the time of writing our original article, the world was fully in the grip of the uncertainties of a global pandemic. As we write this rejoinder article, there is a land war in Europe. Putin, the archetypal autocratic leader, would rather wage war on civilians, hospitals and schools than risk any challenge to his conviction in his single story of his country's future. Like many other autocratic and hubristic leaders, he has acted successfully to incentivize those who report to him, the Russian media, and much of the wider Russian population, not to offer information or perspectives that can challenge conviction in his narrative. In the terms of conviction narrative theory, he has constructed his local environment to maintain a divided state in which data, opinions, theories, emotions, and thoughts that do not fit the prevailing narrative exist in a disconnected and ignored state and do not count. The symbolism of the vast space between him and his team in television appearances is striking and telling. Faced with war, pandemic, climate change, technological disruption, and major migration of human populations, the world is not getting less uncertain anytime soon. Yet the world is not short of leaders in governments and business who avoid uncertainty. Rather than face the anxiety of uncertainty, such leaders flee into the embrace of passionate conviction in a single story of the future, and, as Hodgkinson and Healey (2022) describe, "escalate commitment to courses of action borne of emotional and cognitive fixations that bind them irrationally to a future fundamentally rooted in past and present choices."This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.