Strategies for different uncertainties
Strategies for different uncertainties
Words and tools to help those who "get it" help those who don't.
Hello friends,
For over a year, I’ve run a series of monthly public conversations about not-knowing. The series wraps up this Thursday, 15 February, 2024. If you’d like to join us, details are at the end of this issue.
Who joined these conversations? A diverse set of participants doing uncertainty work. They included programmers, military strategists, political campaign advisors, startup founders, investors, urbanists, organizational consultants, artists, development workers, futurists, product managers, and many others.
We were all linked by a sense that relating properly to uncertainty is practically essential for organizations to succeed, whether it is a fund figuring out how to allocate capital to emergent technologies, or a tech company building R&D teams that are good at developing new products, or a farm trying to make itself more resilient to unpredictable climate.
Unfortunately, it was also clear that organizations found it almost impossibly hard to relate properly to uncertainty. We kept circling back to looking for clearer ways of thinking about, talking about, and acting in different types of uncertainty — different types of not-knowing. Below is a meta-summary of these 14 months of practical thinking about not-knowing.
Helping those who “get it” help those who don’t.
Self-selection means that many people who routinely do uncertainty work — high-level management, strategy, or innovation — already recognize how uncertainty is different from risk. They also see the importance of thinking more clearly about different kinds of uncertainty. They “get it.”
But even people who get it still need frameworks, ways of talking, strategies, and tactics to help them convince their organizations which don’t get it yet — their team members, their managers, their reports — to come along for the ride. People who get it still need tools for persuasion.
A confusion of emotions and words
Unpleasant emotions, especially fear, are rarely openly discussed in organizational life and never in leadership situations. Unfortunately, we are strongly conditioned to fear and avoid uncertainty where it matters most for organizational life. The unacknowledged emotional response to uncertainty is one of the biggest barriers to persuading organizations to relate well to different kinds of not-knowing. Surmounting this emotional barrier requires deploying sneaky strategies: Innocuous, harmless-seeming ways to get past the organizational antibodies that try to kill attempts to relate well to not-knowing. (Training for productive discomfort is a sneaky strategy.)
Navigating unacknowledged fear of uncertainty is not the only challenge. Organizations are also deeply confused about uncertainty. Organizations are collections of people who use words to share ideas and coordinate action. Words are how organizations work — but even the words we use to talk about not-knowing are confused in overlapping ways.
Specifically, “risk” is often overloaded, used to refer to many different situations of not-knowing, most of which are not formal risk. Meanwhile, “uncertainty” has been appropriated to imply true uncertainty even when it usually refers to a situation of formal risk. Worse, this appropriation happens often in fields like AI/ML and economics, where clearly distinguishing between risk and uncertainty is crucial.
This terminological confusion seems trivial but it isn’t. Confused terminology about the unknown stops organizations from relating well to not-knowing. But because definitions seem trivial and unimportant, confused terminology is widespread and insidious — and this confusion creates organizational mindsets that seriously degrade decisionmaking.
Different types of not-knowing
The messy emotions and words surrounding how we relate to not-knowing was a huge obstacle, but a surmountable one. With those out of the way, it became magically easy to think clearly about the different types of not-knowing that we confront all the time. (“Not-knowing” is a clunky phrase whose chief value is to enforce clarity about which type of not-knowing is being talked about.
Each type of not-knowing originates from different sources. (The links in the list below go to articles that unpack each type of not-knowing and its source/s.)
Not-knowing about actions and outcomes arises when the actions we can take and the outcomes that might result are more complex, more variable, more illegible, or more emergent than we expect.
Causal not-knowing — when we don’t know the precise connections between actions we take and the outcomes that result — arises from inaccurately precise quantification, not-knowing about actions and outcomes, multiple causation, and inconsistent causation.
Not-knowing about value arises from the inherent subjectivity of valuation of outcomes, the instability of those subjective valuations over time, and the inconsistency of those subjective valuations across groups of people.
A mindset and toolkit for not-knowing
Understanding how these different types of not-knowing differ from each other in turn makes it possible to distinguish between them and talk about them. This is the foundation of a mindset of not-knowing: Simply being able to say that there are different types of not-knowing, and having a framework to diagnose which type/s of not-knowing the organization faces.
Having a mindset for not-knowing is an unlock. This unlock makes it possible to build a useable, teachable strategy toolkit for relating properly to each type of not-knowing. Diagnostic tools help organizations separate risk from uncertainty, identify different non-risk forms of not-knowing, and uncover implicit assumptions about the unknown. Action tools provide heuristics that help organizations choose what actions to take when faced with different types of not-knowing. Capacity-building tools make organizations more adaptable and resilient to not-knowing. And update tools help organizations sense when circumstances change, reducing barriers to organizational adaptation.
Building up such a toolkit will be a gradual process. Fortunately, we aren’t starting from scratch. The clarity offered by a mindset for not-knowing lets us reimagine how existing tools — currently chosen and used without distinguishing between risk and non-risk types of not-knowing — can be become part of a toolkit for not-knowing. Below, a first iteration:
A clearer view of not-knowing.
Thursday, 15 Feb 2024: The final episode of my Interintellect series synthesizes our 14-month journey towards a clearer view of not-knowing and how to relate better to it. The conversation will focus on practical learnings, and the topics we’ll cover include: The importance of clearly differentiating between risk and uncertainty; how clarity about uncertainty makes it easier to do new things and adapt; the different types of risk and non-risk not-knowing and how they affect our decisionmaking; a mindset for not-knowing; and a toolkit for relating well to not-knowing. 2000h-2200h Central European Standard Time. First-time participants welcomed enthusiastically. Tickets and more details here.
See you here again soon,
VT