Grab bag.
Crass commercialism; not-knowing; an upcoming talk; writing past and future.
Hello again.
I’ve taken another long break from this newsletter, during which I’ve done a lot of ruminating and writing on my website. (Also sea swimming, walking, and messing around with my enormous collection of trivial digital photographs.)
Give the gift of adaptability and resilience.
The season of gift-giving is here again and it calls on me to be crassly commercial. idk is a tool I developed for learning how to be comfortable with the unknown and how to flourish in uncertainty. My strongly held view is that the world we live in is becoming more uncertain and we lack tools for becoming capable of dealing with it — this is why idk exists.
This zeitgeist-appropriate gift ships worldwide. You can get it at www.productivediscomfort.org.
Understanding not-knowing.
I’ve spent a lot of time these past few years working through a vague discontent with how I’ve characterised risk in contrast to uncertainty. This vagueness has now crystallised into a working theory: We use “risk” to refer to many unknowns that aren’t risky, and we increasingly use “uncertainty” to refer, sneakily, to unknowns that are risky. Both misunderstandings lead us to overestimate how well we can deal with risk and uncertainty. We urgently need clearer ways to think about different types of partial knowledge and how we can act when confronted with each type.
So I’ve been working on unpacking dimensions of not-knowing. You can read some of the early essays in the series on my website.
If you find those essays interesting, stay tuned for an InterIntellect series about not-knowing which will be announced soon 🤞.
Not-knowing and philanthropy.
The Joseph Rowntree Foundation is hosting a series of workshops about emerging futures. I’ll be speaking on Wednesday, 14 December (1300h UK/1400h CET/ 0800h Eastern) about why philanthropy and futures work needs to understand the difference between risk and different types of not-knowing. (As the implosion of Effective Altruism perhaps already makes clear.) I’m also very interested to hear what fellow speakers Victoria Haro, Jeevun Sandher, and Hilary Cottam have to say about this.
The workshop is free to attend and will be held on Zoom. You can get a ticket here.
Other things and writings.
Organizing for innovation: I spoke about using uncertainty to organize for innovation at the tenth anniversary of The Conference this August. You can watch the video of the talk here. (I also wrote about the relationship between innovation and not-knowing.)
A better way to set strategic goals: Conventional goal-setting approaches don’t work because they don’t force decisionmakers to clarify their tradeoffs. So of course the highly unconventional goal-setting process I developed focuses explicitly on tradeoffs. You can read more here about how it works, and why it clarifies strategy and frees people and teams to be more adaptable.
Strategy and design theory: Design and strategy are often talked about but nearly always misunderstood. Here is a collection of brief essays about how strategy and design theory speak to each other. (This is not about the design of products and services.)
Maintenance and evolution: I wrote a little bit in an issue of The Prepared’s newsletter about how growing population wheat is conceptually different from monocultural wheat agriculture (the dominant model for growing wheat today) and why population wheat implements a logic of evolutionary design and maintenance by design.
A parting question.
I am curious about your reaction to this synopsis of some pun-driven low-intervention wine detective fiction:
Bernard's dissertation supervisor, a prominent Kantian philosopher, is visiting on sabbatical. All is well until he comes into Bernard's bar one day and orders a glass of riesling from Hansjoerg Rebholz's best vineyard, that glorious Grosses Gewächs named "Im Sonnenschein." After taking a hearty gulp of this most delicate and delicious of dry wines, he nearly immediately falls into a coma! At the hospital, Bernard learns that his advisor is diabetic and would have died from hyperglycemic shock had it not been for the zippiness of Bernard's elderly but trusty Volkswagen Golf. Suddenly suspicious, Bernard rushes back to the bar to find that the bottle of supposedly GG riesling has been tampered with — it is in fact some sickly and forgettable trockenbeerenauslese from a middling vineyard. And not even one in the Pfalz. Was this merely a bottling error or was it a devious plan to assassinate Bernard's advisor? Is there more to Bernard's advisor than meets the eye? Will Bernard be forced to engage in ... A CRITIQUE OF PURE RIESLING?See you soon.
In just over a week, the planet will begin its journey back toward the Sun. Best wishes as this year ends and the next begins.
VT