Uncertainty Manifesto
“The world is more magical, less predictable, more autonomous, less controllable, more varied, less simple, more infinite, less knowable, more wonderfully troubling than we could have imagined being able to tolerate when we were young.”
—James Hollis
Reframing how you feel about uncertainty includes becoming aware of your foundational beliefs about your work and your purpose. Though guiding motivations are and should be personal, we have noticed some remarkable similarities among individuals adept at facing uncertainty. They call it by different names (e.g., stoicism, mindfulness, faith), attribute it to different forces (e.g., God, the universe, luck, timing), and it manifests in different ways, but it often comes down to a similar philosophy. Quite simply, the ability to calmly face uncertainty seems to be related to whether you view your goals as internal (i.e., doing your best, being your best, learning) rather than external (i.e., being the best, being the most famous) and whether you view outcomes as partly outside your control versus completely inside your control.
John Winsor, the founder of multiple companies and a fellow at Harvard Business School’s innovation lab, describes developing this perspective after being caught in an avalanche. Before the climb, Winsor and his fellow climbers had trained extensively and checked the weather. But despite their best preparations, as they traversed a glacier, a crack appeared on the hillside above them and the snow started to slide under their feet. Winsor stayed calm, grabbing the climber next to him as they had been trained to and shouting, “Let’s ride this out! It’s not going to be any big deal.”1
What they couldn’t see was that the fracture line above them was nine feet deep and a thousand feet across. Suddenly the whole of the mountainside came rushing down like a gargantuan tidal wave, filling the valley with a deafening roar. The snow hit the team from behind, tumbling them head over heels in a blind white flurry until suddenly it stopped, hard as cement. Everyone had been buried, the fortunate ones partway. Thanks to their training, and some luck, the entire team was rescued, but that sort of close call, Winsor reflects, “shakes everyone up so much [that] there are these long lingering effects in … the psyche of each individual person, in what they are willing to experience, in the confidence to go out there and do it again, and in how they are willing to accept risk.”2
As he looks back on his career, Winsor compares his experience as an entrepreneur, and disruptor, to that avalanche. You go into this terrain and there is opportunity there,” he says, but even if you do “all the analytics to approach it safely … everything can be going along and a massive disruption happens.”
The unexpected, or fear of the expected, can dent your willingness to try, depending on how you look at uncertainty.
We have this perception in business: we think we control the world. I think what is probably more correct is it’s more about timing … and interpreting the world instead of trying to say we control it…. It would be much healthier to think about it in the context … of trying to be in the right place at the right time and to create something…. A really good surfer finds themselves at the right place at the right time to take off on a wave, but then always flows and does maneuvers to stay where the most powerful part of the energy of the wave is.3
Winsor’s example illustrates the importance of finding and holding on to a foundational belief about uncertainty and your relationship to it. We suggest creating an uncertainty manifesto, a motto or intention that can carry you through any uncertainty you face. Derived from the Latin for easily recognizable or obvious, a manifesto is a statement, often shared publicly, that makes clear your intentions or position about something. When Winsor talks about the people and organizations that can face uncertainty, he talks about doing one’s best and leaving the rest up to timing. Straightforward. Likewise, when Jeff Bezos talks about leaving a great job to start Amazon, he describes a focus on living a life he wouldn’t regret, regardless of whether his startup succeeded or not. Simple. How helpful would it be to have a straightforward and simple uncertainty manifesto to cut through the confusion and noise the unknown usually brings?
Harnessing a guiding belief system can be empowering. David Heinemeier Hansson, the serial entrepreneur behind Ruby on Rails and Basecamp, acknowledges that while he understood these principles intuitively, developing an explicit view—in his case by borrowing from stoicism—has helped him immensely:
Having some external philosophy of life has helped. Because prior to me discovering stoicism, [my company] didn’t really have a great vocabulary to talk about this. We were sort of on the same page, but there were still certain times when things happen, like “What if a competitor does something?” but this is one of those things you almost get liberated from when you realize, “Worry about the things you can control.” Right, so what if a competitor comes out with a competing product? That is what competitors do, and they do their thing, and we will do our thing: put out a great product, treat our people well, and deal ethically with the market. Doing that releases you from the stress, from the ends having to justify the means, and the outcome becomes of third or fourth importance. It releases you from all that stress of failure.4
The idea that outcomes are partially outside your control can be hard to swallow, but the truth is that in an uncertain world, a lot of things are outside your control. The founders of YouTube weren’t brilliant visionaries who saw something no one else saw. There were video-sharing startups founded by smart, dedicated founders before and after them. The YouTube founders initially wanted to create a dating site, but found that people were only uploading videos. They got lucky to be in the right place at the right time when falling storage costs and rising consumer adoption of online video created a perfect storm for their success.
If we adopt a perspective that the goal of life is external—such as money, position, and power—and that the outcome of our efforts is within our control, we can get trapped in an unsatisfiable, Machiavellian obsession with being the best. We’ll measure ourselves against a constantly moving target because there will always be a dimension on which someone else outstrips us. And if we believe that the goal of life is external but the outcomes are partly outside our control, we tend to get stuck in mercurial fatalism, where we believe the world is unfair and we just didn’t get the breaks we deserve. By contrast, if we can adopt the view that the goal is internal—our own learning and progress—we will already be better off, even if we still think the outcome is completely within our control. Why? Because the internal goal will be more sustaining even if we make ruminating progress, obsessing about everything that goes wrong and mistakenly thinking that it was all up to us.
The most resilient people in the face of uncertainty—the ones who feel the least anxiety, the ones who are more likely to take the most worthwhile risks, the ones who get back on the horse when they get knocked off—adopt the perspective that the goal of life is internal and that the results are partly outside their control. These are the enlightened pathbreakers. As Heinemeier Hansson describes, they can let go of the worry that if they don’t do things perfectly they might fail, and instead focus on doing their best work.
Certainly, many people have succeeded via Machiavellian obsession or mercurial fatalism, and we all fall into those traps from time to time. Moreover, no innovator we studied had unmitigated success—all of them failed in some respect or did something they regretted. But the most powerful and liberating view you can adopt for your own uncertainty manifesto may simply be to do your best and let the chips fall where they may.
Reflection and Practice
To clarify the different approaches to uncertainty we observed, we use the 2x2 matrix shown in figure 9-1. While it is impossible to maintain a perfect perspective all the time, remembering this framework is helpful for proceeding calmly and hopefully in any situation.
FIGURE 9-1
Goal versus control orientation
As it turns out, this 2x2 has some deep foundations. The ancient Greek Stoics argued that because many things are outside our control, if we can move beyond obsessing about why things happen and focus instead on our response, we will be much happier. Likewise, perspectives from mindfulness and Zen Buddhism suggest focusing on being present to what is happening and choosing our best response; trying to control the situation leads to suffering.
But this framework also has roots in psychology, particularly the views espoused by Alfred Adler, a contemporary of Sigmund Freud. Adler rejected much of his colleague’s view that what happens to us in the past determines our present (e.g., that an abusive relationship dooms you to a life of abusive relationships). While Adlerian psychology empathetically acknowledges the pain caused by past events, it argues that our response to these things determines our future. If life deals us a hand of cards, instead of blaming our actions on what cards we got, we can instead ask, “What hand can I play now?” Whatever the past or the future holds, it is our response that holds power.
Likewise, Nassim Taleb, a former investor who writes about risk, volatility, and uncertainty, argues that attempts to control uncertainty are doomed to fail. But modern psychology underscores that they can also be dangerously counterproductive. Stanford psychiatrist Irvin Yalom observed that “feeling helpless and confused in the face of random, unpatterned events, we seek to order them and, in so doing, gain a sense of control over them.”5 But instead of gaining control, Yalom says, we end up creating patterns that are incorrect and serve us poorly, creating an “illusion of control” that we repeat to our own detriment. Below are some different approaches for developing your uncertainty manifesto. Focus on those that resonate for you.
- Read thoughtful reflections to develop your uncertainty manifesto. A few of our favorites include:
– The Manual: A Philosopher’s Guide to Life, by Epictetus
– The Three Marriages, by David Whyte
– A Guide to the Good Life, by William B. Irvine
– Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life, by James Hollis
– The Marginalian, a blog formerly known as Brain Pickings, authored by Maria Popova (who originally called our attention to Irvin Yalom)
- Interrogate your beliefs to discover your knee-jerk reaction or philosophy—though it may be subconscious—about uncertainty.
– When you started reading this book, what were your beliefs about uncertainty? When something bad happens, how do you respond (e.g., blame yourself, blame circumstance, reframe what happened, get curious)?
– How might your relationship with uncertainty be changing? For example, could you adopt statements like “I am curious about the possibility waiting for me beyond the uncertainty I currently face,” “Uncertainty attends every possibility,” and “I trust I can find possibility in adjacent possibles, infinite games, and my personal frontiers.”
– Writing out an uncertainty manifesto will help ground you when facing the unknown. Your manifesto should be written on a human scale: It isn’t the stuff of superheroes or pompous arrogance. It can and should acknowledge the emotions it is triggering for you but should reframe uncertainty in terms of possibility. A powerful uncertainty manifesto can offer an infusion of energy and courage. If you can’t think of one, try this one: “Uncertainty brings both chaos and possibility, but I am a chaos pilot! I will find the possibility.”
- Acknowledge paradox: Everything we’ve talked about in this chapter involves a dose of paradox, a quantum physics idea that two things can be true at once and that there are irresolvable tensions we have to accommodate. On the one hand, things are partially outside your control, but on the other hand, you aren’t helpless—you should try to be your best and hope to affect the outside world. This is a paradox. There is a small but growing literature that acknowledges paradoxes. For example, if top leaders want their companies to innovate but also survive, they have to accommodate the competing demands for running an efficient business with the differing demands to innovate. Likewise, entrepreneurs need to build coalitions with a shared identity to create new industries while also carving out a distinct identity within those coalitions. In chaos theory, this idea is known as the edge of chaos, a paradoxical zone in a state of disequilibrium where change happens. If you find such ideas helpful, read deeper into chaos and complexity theory. But for many of us it is probably most helpful to acknowledge that uncertainty is not easily tied up with a bow, but involves trade-offs, competing objectives, and paradoxes.