The Perils of Incomplete Pictures and Short-Term Fear

Your brain loves a tidy story — even if it’s missing half the facts. And it hates losing — even when the “loss” leads to bigger gains later.

These two instincts, deeply wired into human decision-making, sit quietly behind many stalled climate strategies. Daniel Kahneman, in Thinking, Fast and Slow, gave them names: WYSIATI (What You See Is All There Is) and Loss Aversion.

WYSIATI: The Illusion of a Complete Picture

When faced with complex problems, our minds default to building a story from the data in front of us, rarely stopping to ask: What’s missing?
In climate strategy, this bias shows up in subtle but dangerous ways:

• A company spends months getting approval and budget for a carbon reduction action plan, only to discover external trends will erode the year on year ROI.

• An organisation plans to electrify their fleet of vehicles to reduce fuel use, only to discover their audited inventory now needs to include their Scope 3-2 emissions (capital goods) as material and it will double their emissions.

The danger? Decisions that feel well-founded today can be exposed as dangerously incomplete tomorrow.

Projections are the antidote. A robust emissions model doesn’t just calculate — it interrogates. It forces you to confront the full reality of your action plan.

Loss Aversion: When Fear Beats Logic

If WYSIATI blinds us to what’s missing, Loss Aversion freezes us when we finally see the full picture.

Kahneman’s research found we fear losses roughly twice as much as we value equivalent gains. It’s why a company will reject electrifying its fleet because of a visible upfront “loss” — even when the long-term gains in fuel savings, maintenance reductions, and insulation from future carbon prices dwarf the initial cost.

Projections can reframe this mental trap. A good model shows not just the cost today, but the avoided losses tomorrow — compounding year after year. Instead of “spending $X on electrification,” the conversation shifts to “saving $Y and avoiding $Z in penalties over the next decade.” The numbers make the upside impossible to ignore.

Two Biases, One Risk

Left unchecked, WYSIATI and Loss Aversion feed each other. An incomplete picture makes the upside invisible, while fear of loss magnifies the downside. The solution isn’t just more data — it’s structured, quantitative projections that both expose what’s missing and make the long-term benefits unmissable.

When it comes to climate strategy, if the picture looks too simple, it probably is. And if the future gain seems too far away, you probably haven’t quantified it clearly enough.