Back in the game.
Here and there.
Hello friends,
Over the new year, I was in upstate New York, the DC area, and Cambridge. There was a bit of work, but it was largely an excuse to escape Singapore’s heat and humidity and reflect on 2024. One thing I re-realised: Each year passes slowly in the moment but fast as a whole, and remembering even major events is nearly impossible without resorting to the calendar. What doesn’t get recorded somewhere and actively recalled usually gets forgotten. I wasn’t planning to be gone for three months, but here we are.
I went quiet because relocating back to Singapore (yes, I’m back; Singapore friends and neighbors, let’s catch up) has taken up more headspace than I wanted it to. Handling the numerous uncertainties that swirl around aging parents in declining health is hard to schedule around.
Outside the personal domain, the first two months of 2025 have also been filled with uncertainty. When I talk about uncertainty, I don’t mean the quantifiable unknowns that can be accurately expressed in probabilities and risk tables. As I’ve written before, “in true uncertainty, you are missing crucial information about actions, outcomes, causation, or valuation. This missing information makes it impossible to accurately calculate expected outcomes and what they are worth.”
The uncertainty of early 2025 has a different flavour from the Covid-19 uncertainty in early 2020, or the first phases of the Global Financial Crisis in 2008. The world order seems to be on the cusp of a dramatic dislocation. (The dislocation has probably already happened, with what remains of the appearance of normalcy being preserved by the inertia and momentum of very large systems.)
Even in the last month, the range of possible actions states can take (and have taken) has expanded into previously unimagined areas. There is now a lot more uncertainty about the range of possible outcomes that might result, the causal mechanisms connecting actions and outcomes, and how outcomes are subjectively valued. Each of these is a different type of not-knowing that brings its own pattern of challenges and opportunities.
In all this, I’m keeping my eye on how not-knowing can be generative and create space for opportunity, even as it disorients and creates panic and distress. All my work for the last 15 years has been about helping organizations and systems understand uncertainty and what to do about it.
I’ve been working with the UN Development Programme for over a year, building and deploying concretely applicable management tools to help teams that have to operate in an increasingly uncertain and rapidly changing development environment.
Most of January I spent preparing and delivering workshops for UNDP offices in Tunisia and Istanbul. These were workshops to help teams articulate tradeoffs more transparently and straightforwardly than they had before — and to teach them how to do this tradeoff articulation on their own. Seeing how quickly these workshops had concrete effect reinforced my belief that talking about tradeoffs is the only way to be pragmatic and creative about shared strategy and strategic goals, especially when resources and constraints are uncertain.
Knowing there would be a language barrier, I refactored my usual workshop to make the process much more granular and even clearer than before. The feedback was better than I’d hoped—one participant said the process was “exceptionally straightforward, concrete, and immediately applicable for a tool that was newly introduced to a team.”
So now I’m building again—this time a tool to solve a problem I’ve been wrestling with for over a decade. I’ll share more when I have a junky prototype. (The last time I built a tool was in 2021, and the result was idk, which is the first training tool for productive discomfort. You should check it out.)
See you in a couple weeks,
VT
