Franklin D. Roosevelt famously declared in 1933 that "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself." He identified the problem, but nearly a century later, we still have not properly understood its mechanism. In today's volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) world, that failure is becoming increasingly dangerous.
We have become fluent in naming modern anxieties. FOMO explained the fear of missing out. FOBO captured the paralysis of endless choice. FOFO described the fear of finding out bad news. Each acronym helped define a specific outward-facing anxiety tied to decisions, opportunities, or social comparison.
But none of them explains what happens when fear turns inward.
What happens when the nervous system itself becomes the object of fear? What happens when people become afraid not of the event, but of their own emotional response to the event?
That is what I call FOFI: Fear of Fear Itself.
FOFI is not a clinical diagnosis. It is a cultural and leadership framework for understanding the recursive anxiety loop now shaping workplaces, institutions, governments, and societies. It describes the condition where the anticipation of anxiety becomes more debilitating than the original threat itself.
And in a VUCA world, leaders can increasingly become amplifiers of this loop rather than regulators of it.
The mechanism is evident. Human beings attempt to predict, overprepare, and hyper-control uncertainty in order to feel safe. On the surface, this appears responsible. In reality, it often creates the opposite effect. The constant state of vigilance signals to the nervous system that danger is permanent and that safety is conditional.
This is where FOFI becomes self-generating.
The more we attempt to eliminate uncertainty entirely, the more neurologically unsafe the world begins to feel. Overthinking becomes brain overkill, hyper-alertness becomes normalized, and control becomes compulsion.
Neuroscience already has language for this. Clinicians describe it through dysregulation of the autonomic nervous system and the collapse of what Dr. Dan Siegel termed the "window of tolerance." Within that window, people can tolerate uncertainty, think clearly, connect with others, and respond rationally under pressure. Outside it, they move into anxiety, hypervigilance, panic, or hypoarousal, numbness, withdrawal, and shutdown.
FOFI is what happens when individuals and systems repeatedly push people beyond that threshold. This is why I believe VUCA has always been, at its core, a problem of FOFI.
The VUCA framework successfully explained the external environment: volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. What it failed to fully address was the neurological toll of living inside that environment continuously. Organizations now function in conditions of sustained physiological activation, where people are constantly scanning for threat, conserving cognitive resources, and defaulting to reactive behavior.
Leaders often misinterpret this as disengagement, low resilience, or resistance to change. In reality, many teams are simply neurologically overwhelmed. Due to that, the leadership challenge today is co-regulating at all levels of an organization: individual, team, and the whole system.
The best leaders, I believe, are those capable of remaining regulated under pressure while helping others stay within an effective window of tolerance. They provide steadiness without denial, honesty without panic, and direction without emotional contagion. Those are the precise strategies that we advocate leaders adopt during uncertain times.
Those who cannot do this become what I describe as "FOFI generators." They transmit anxiety downward into cultures and systems already operating at neurological capacity.
One of the most surprising places where this dynamic becomes visible is in research surrounding anorexia nervosa. Clinical literature increasingly identifies intolerance of uncertainty as a central mechanism within the disorder. Patients often respond to uncertainty with extreme control behaviors: rigid planning, restriction, compulsive organization, and attempts to eliminate unpredictability entirely.
This lesson can be profoundly transferable to leadership. Clinicians working with anorexia nervosa have learned that recovery cannot occur through force, pressure, or the elimination of uncertainty itself. What works instead is the creation of a "holding and containing space," an environment that is calm, consistent, relationally safe, firm, and emotionally regulated.
The same principle applies inside organizations.
Fear-driven leadership cultures often attempt to manage uncertainty through excessive control, compulsory optimism, punitive responses, or performative certainty. These approaches do not reduce FOFI. They intensify it. They communicate to people that uncertainty is intolerable and fear must be hidden rather than processed.
Amy Edmondson's work on psychological safety helps explain why this matters. Psychological safety was never meant to mean comfort or the absence of accountability. It was meant to create conditions where people could tolerate the discomfort of speaking up, making mistakes, challenging authority, and engaging in interpersonal risk-taking.
But none of that is neurologically possible in a state of FOFI.
When fear of fear itself dominates a system, people stop taking risks. They hide mistakes. They disengage cognitively. Meetings become performative, and innovation collapses into self-protection. Psychological safety is not the absence of fear. It is the presence of enough trust that fear does not have the final word.
FOFI explains why that trust is now so fragile.
The most important insight, however, is also the least comfortable: once people are pushed beyond the tipping point, bringing them back is substantially harder than preventing the collapse in the first place.
The nervous system learns. Under chronic FOFI conditions, it learns that vigilance is necessary for survival. Reversing that learning requires relational safety, consistency, and time. It cannot be solved through motivational slogans or corporate wellness language detached from structural reality.
This places an uncomfortable responsibility on businesses, families, schools, institutions, and governments.
The question FOFI places before every leader, parent, educator, administrator, and government official is, therefore, not, "How do we manage anxiety?" It is: "Are we creating conditions of safety, or conditions of threat?" and "Are people in this team moving toward or away from collective action?" In a world of structural VUCA, these questions may be the most important leadership questions of our time, and for the first time, we have a name for what happens when we get the answer wrong.
The antidote to FOFI is ultimately the capacity to walk alongside fear without collapsing beneath it, together. That, in essence, is resilience in its most humble, yet sophisticated form.
About the author:
Francesco Placanica is the founder of Placanica | Leadership Unstuck, a High-Stakes Leadership Diplomacy Firm working with Australia's most successful CEOs, Boards, C-Suites, and Family Offices. He serves as a Corporate Hostage Negotiator and Leadership Team Coach, acting as a confidential sounding board for complex leadership matters.
As a former Chief Technology Officer of the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, he brings over 20 years' experience supporting Boards and Executive Teams navigate the complexities of change and disruption, with a focus on managing high-stakes conflict and delivering sustainable performance in uncertain environments.
