There is something in the air man! All week I've heard stories about uncertainty and faith, stories about "now" vs "then", views on self-reliance vs tech-reliance and questions about what ultimately makes us human. I wrote about some of those themes in a post (below) while playing with the idea of certainty and uncertainty. Bizarrely, those themes seemed to be front and center in media, conversations and work for most of last week. It should be noted that I started and "finished" this blog last week prior to noticing all the mojo (call it the force, some Zen flow or straight up Judeo-Christian mojo). I won't lie, I felt a bit psychic even if just for a moment, at least until I realized that I might simply be cluing-in on the themes I had written about...silly predictably superstitious human!
While I like the subject of this sketch it has gotten away from me. For those of you who don't know I only get to post if I craft a new business or value idea. This rule is my own self imposed constraint set to spare you from nutty Liberal rants about the value of the "little" people and my belief that universal healthcare and education would stimulate small business and American Innovation -never mind be good for the health of this nation. Needless to say, I haven't been able to finalize and publish this post because I haven't come up with a biz idea based on the central theme/life experience. The theme of this post is more like an OP-ED or social critique minus the validating references ;) and thus has been a real challenge to creating a novel value sketch or biz idea. Long story short, I am stumped.
(From last week)
I've been thinking people are far less comfortable with uncertainty these days -more so than even a hundred years ago, I think. This strikes me as odd for some reason. It seems to me that
life is more certain than ever (in NorthAmerica anyway). The weather is predicted with near precision. We can look into the future with forecast modeling to understand our own globally heated demise. We have an abundance of food, so much that we actually toss tons of food each week into the garbage in the name of public health (think about that one). Supply is kept in constant flow so that we can be certain "it" will be there when we get there to buy it. We have tools that take the human touch out of craft and assure consistently predictable, unstoppably normal quality in nearly everything. We have processes that allow teams to replicate consistent service experiences for a wide range of people, backgrounds and cultures. Life is so certain that even advertising has realized how predictably manufactured their own messages are and have spent recent years on the quest for delight, surprise and authenticity.
Life is more certain than it has ever been, not less, and this only makes "uncertainty" seem that much more uncertain when in my opinion it is not really.
If you step back to take it all in it's really quite amazing to consider. Think about it, water always flows when turned on and energy is just "there" 24/7. Even in the face of natural calamity most people can expect that power is returned within a few days, if not hours of a major storm. We have insurance for insurance and government insurance ensuring it all. Food is available and abundant even if the only way to get it is to steal it, it is still there! Similarly, millions of people drive cars filled with gasoline each day and we seem to never "run out" of gas-at literally hundreds of thousands of filling stations. There is a near endless supply of clothing as well. Shelter can be found with relative ease even if it takes the form of an underpass or Mission. This might sound crazy but it is really amazing to ponder, there are no wild animals hunting us...think about that one! We humans have even gone as far as to be able to transplant a heart from a dead person into a living person with relatively consistent success.
If that isn't more certain than uncertain then I am a monkey's Uncle, HO-LY CR-AP!-!-!
As a result it seems uncertainty really, really freaks out Americans (I'm lumpin' you in there too Canada!). In fact, I'd say we really don't much like uncertainty and are losing the ability to deal with it one quarter at a time! Uncertainty is destabilizing and difficult to manage. Uncertainty is messy and unknowable. Uncertainty should go away! (So we think and say)
It's no wonder why people like certainty so much after all it is so predictably understandable and easy! Certainty requires no faith in the unknown because it simply just "is". Certainty is understood intrinsically. It has absolutely no surprises. Surely this is why business is in love with certainty, and 'certainty' certainly likes the people of business because people keep the dream of certainty alive with every advance in technology and science. Science makes certain. The only problem is those advances tend to lead to more certainty which creates less tolerance for uncertainty. -Such a vicious circle!
So here's what I've been thinking this weekend. In the past people leveraged a thing called faith as a way to manage uncertainty. If you ask me faith allowed prior generations a higher threshold for uncertainty. They didn't know if a hard winter would come but they had faith that they'd make it through the winter. If a hard winter came they leveraged the lessons of faith to help guide them through the roughest and leanest of times. They worked hard, they helped each other, they believed in a higher calling, they surrendered to uncertainty and gave those very difficult issues to God or the gods.
In the process they learned valuable lessons such as patience, humility, graciousness and decency. Their ability to coexist with uncertainty and the "unknowable" was highly unscientific, sometimes counter productive and not nearly as comfy as today's modern certainties, but rest assured their world did not end if they ran out of toilet paper. Example- my great-grandma was born in 1897 and I was lucky enough to know her. She was a whip, strong, sassy, funny and self reliant. If asked about the future she'd say, "who could know?" or "only God knows!" And she and others from her generation seemed comfortable in that kind of thinking! To them uncertainty was not a problem, it merely just was.
Ultimately I think people had a higher tolerance for uncertainty in past generations partly because of faith but MOSTLY because uncertainty was more normal than certainty! Will you eat today? Well, only if you find berries or a small animal to kill. Will you be warm this winter? Only if you mend your old jacket, the only one you own. Somewhere along the path to certainty we fooled ourselves with modern consistency and predictability. We created a world so known and easy that when the unpredictable happens we are leveled to chaos or blame, clamoring for answers and asking how could this happen in this day and age? Even without unpredicted calamity we seem to be more and more leveled, lacking spirit, when faced with the monotony that certainty provides -an omission of hope that comes from giving in to the consistent quality of ongoing sameness.
Have we lost the ability to understand and trust uncertainty? I think so. Specifically, I feel we could lose the ability to learn from the lessons uncertainty provides. We are a modern society with less and less opportunity to fully experience putting faith "into" something or someone because for the most part we don't have to put faith in anything really. Predictable experiences designed to guide behavior seek to limit any emotion other than the positive ones. So much of modern life is pretty much the same thing day in and day out. Food arrives at hundreds of thousands of grocery stores all over North America each day, all year long. We have a near endless supply of stuff in America. We work under the assumption that abundance should/is available to anyone (more and more dropping the modifier "anyone-who works hard for it"). Even the poor among us are the richest poor people in the world. I don't mean to marginalize anyone who is in need, poor health or dire straights but I do hope to state a case that life is more certain than ever and that leads to a disdain for anything other than the predictable (status quo) [in business].
Lack of faith and distrust for uncertainty manifests in people who can't deal with the unlikely event that they will have to wait 5 minutes in a drive through. It manifests in people who melt down when their train is late or they don't get into the school or job of their dreams. It manifests in teams who lean so hard on "process" that they lose sight of aha and create mediocrity over and over and over with laser like, quantified precision. It manifests in quarterly views rather than generational outlooks. At it's worst, I think a lack of faith in uncertainty leads to distrust and disempowers individual contribution to a greater social good. The quest for certainty diminishes discovery and limits growth because certainty begs for a tipping point that no longer tips after a certain point, eternally. ...that's forever man!
So where the heck am I going with this and where is the business idea? Good question. I haven't even figured that out yet myself! I do know that US society seems more and more upset by the tiniest of uncertain moments. A product goes bad-#FAIL! A website has a disabled feature -#FAIL! An untrained, minimally educated, poverty paid retail worker let's you the customer down OMG-#MEGAFAIL! The customer finds out they're not right -#SCREWYOU-FAIL!!! You get whole milk in your latte rather than soy -by accident no less -#FAIL-THREATEN-TO-SUE!!! Flights consolidated again (and again) (and again) -#DAMNATIONFAIL pushed out to all social media channels and hopefully redistributed at an exponential rate of FAIL, FAIL, FAIL!!!
Seriously, what is wrong with us? Have we become so accustomed to certainty that we are losing our ability to handle the smallest of modern life's trivial uncertainties and hiccups?
I know I am just as guilty as the rest here. It is hard to avoid when certainty is more certain than uncertain. It is hard to avoid when you are certain that as a customer you ARE always right. It is harder when you are told you ARE always right, mostly about everything in advertising. Societal resentment and "take-that" reactions result when small uncertainties scratch the surface of certainty's exterior. Resentment and crude behavior reign king over patience, lessons, gratitude and wisdom. They reign king over and suppress discovery, engaged work and trust. Worse yet they reign king over decency and devalue differences because certainty desperately craves others to be more or less the same as itself. Certainty craves uniformity. Certainty craves a miracle of science -scaled, processed and flawlessly consistent.
I still don't have a business idea for this one yet. I can't post this until I do. Rules, stupid self imposed rules!
Ok, I am sick of looking at this post so I'm gonna weasel out of this one with a consulting service idea. The professional services company would consult on, you guessed it, uncertainty. Specifically, it'd be a gang of uncertainty prototypin bad asses who'd teach your company how to deal in tough times. They would help you run "OMG" scenarios and teach your managers how to talk other managers, employees, customers and suppliers down off the cliff. They would train with the best in crisis management and provide services to both public and private entities. Think SWAT or Fire Fighters of the corporate world! This companies primary mission would be to help you realize where the status quo has taken over and develop and deploy targeted uncertainty games to help your team learn from hard lessons while staying engaged and authentic.
The hook is this team would not simply teach preparedness and crisis management it would also focus heavily on traditional leadership training. A major focal point would be placed on self organization and team autonomy. Leaders would be taught how to embrace uncertainty and build great products and services around the full range of circumstances that frame our human response. They'll be given tools and methods to guide with faith (embracing and learning from the unknown or unknowable) while fostering trust in every action. A hard work ethos slanted towards patience, decency and wisdom rather than cut-throat work-hard, play-hard, take-that attitudes will be the soul of the business.
Wooooooo, there. DONE! Finally.
Life is more certain than it has ever been, not less, and this only makes "uncertainty" seem that much more uncertain when in my opinion it is not really.
If you step back to take it all in it's really quite amazing to consider. Think about it, water always flows when turned on and energy is just "there" 24/7. Even in the face of natural calamity most people can expect that power is returned within a few days, if not hours of a major storm. We have insurance for insurance and government insurance ensuring it all. Food is available and abundant even if the only way to get it is to steal it, it is still there! Similarly, millions of people drive cars filled with gasoline each day and we seem to never "run out" of gas-at literally hundreds of thousands of filling stations. There is a near endless supply of clothing as well. Shelter can be found with relative ease even if it takes the form of an underpass or Mission. This might sound crazy but it is really amazing to ponder, there are no wild animals hunting us...think about that one! We humans have even gone as far as to be able to transplant a heart from a dead person into a living person with relatively consistent success.
If that isn't more certain than uncertain then I am a monkey's Uncle, HO-LY CR-AP!-!-!
As a result it seems uncertainty really, really freaks out Americans (I'm lumpin' you in there too Canada!). In fact, I'd say we really don't much like uncertainty and are losing the ability to deal with it one quarter at a time! Uncertainty is destabilizing and difficult to manage. Uncertainty is messy and unknowable. Uncertainty should go away! (So we think and say)
It's no wonder why people like certainty so much after all it is so predictably understandable and easy! Certainty requires no faith in the unknown because it simply just "is". Certainty is understood intrinsically. It has absolutely no surprises. Surely this is why business is in love with certainty, and 'certainty' certainly likes the people of business because people keep the dream of certainty alive with every advance in technology and science. Science makes certain. The only problem is those advances tend to lead to more certainty which creates less tolerance for uncertainty. -Such a vicious circle!
So here's what I've been thinking this weekend. In the past people leveraged a thing called faith as a way to manage uncertainty. If you ask me faith allowed prior generations a higher threshold for uncertainty. They didn't know if a hard winter would come but they had faith that they'd make it through the winter. If a hard winter came they leveraged the lessons of faith to help guide them through the roughest and leanest of times. They worked hard, they helped each other, they believed in a higher calling, they surrendered to uncertainty and gave those very difficult issues to God or the gods.
In the process they learned valuable lessons such as patience, humility, graciousness and decency. Their ability to coexist with uncertainty and the "unknowable" was highly unscientific, sometimes counter productive and not nearly as comfy as today's modern certainties, but rest assured their world did not end if they ran out of toilet paper. Example- my great-grandma was born in 1897 and I was lucky enough to know her. She was a whip, strong, sassy, funny and self reliant. If asked about the future she'd say, "who could know?" or "only God knows!" And she and others from her generation seemed comfortable in that kind of thinking! To them uncertainty was not a problem, it merely just was.
Ultimately I think people had a higher tolerance for uncertainty in past generations partly because of faith but MOSTLY because uncertainty was more normal than certainty! Will you eat today? Well, only if you find berries or a small animal to kill. Will you be warm this winter? Only if you mend your old jacket, the only one you own. Somewhere along the path to certainty we fooled ourselves with modern consistency and predictability. We created a world so known and easy that when the unpredictable happens we are leveled to chaos or blame, clamoring for answers and asking how could this happen in this day and age? Even without unpredicted calamity we seem to be more and more leveled, lacking spirit, when faced with the monotony that certainty provides -an omission of hope that comes from giving in to the consistent quality of ongoing sameness.
Have we lost the ability to understand and trust uncertainty? I think so. Specifically, I feel we could lose the ability to learn from the lessons uncertainty provides. We are a modern society with less and less opportunity to fully experience putting faith "into" something or someone because for the most part we don't have to put faith in anything really. Predictable experiences designed to guide behavior seek to limit any emotion other than the positive ones. So much of modern life is pretty much the same thing day in and day out. Food arrives at hundreds of thousands of grocery stores all over North America each day, all year long. We have a near endless supply of stuff in America. We work under the assumption that abundance should/is available to anyone (more and more dropping the modifier "anyone-who works hard for it"). Even the poor among us are the richest poor people in the world. I don't mean to marginalize anyone who is in need, poor health or dire straights but I do hope to state a case that life is more certain than ever and that leads to a disdain for anything other than the predictable (status quo) [in business].
Lack of faith and distrust for uncertainty manifests in people who can't deal with the unlikely event that they will have to wait 5 minutes in a drive through. It manifests in people who melt down when their train is late or they don't get into the school or job of their dreams. It manifests in teams who lean so hard on "process" that they lose sight of aha and create mediocrity over and over and over with laser like, quantified precision. It manifests in quarterly views rather than generational outlooks. At it's worst, I think a lack of faith in uncertainty leads to distrust and disempowers individual contribution to a greater social good. The quest for certainty diminishes discovery and limits growth because certainty begs for a tipping point that no longer tips after a certain point, eternally. ...that's forever man!
So where the heck am I going with this and where is the business idea? Good question. I haven't even figured that out yet myself! I do know that US society seems more and more upset by the tiniest of uncertain moments. A product goes bad-#FAIL! A website has a disabled feature -#FAIL! An untrained, minimally educated, poverty paid retail worker let's you the customer down OMG-#MEGAFAIL! The customer finds out they're not right -#SCREWYOU-FAIL!!! You get whole milk in your latte rather than soy -by accident no less -#FAIL-THREATEN-TO-SUE!!! Flights consolidated again (and again) (and again) -#DAMNATIONFAIL pushed out to all social media channels and hopefully redistributed at an exponential rate of FAIL, FAIL, FAIL!!!
Seriously, what is wrong with us? Have we become so accustomed to certainty that we are losing our ability to handle the smallest of modern life's trivial uncertainties and hiccups?
I know I am just as guilty as the rest here. It is hard to avoid when certainty is more certain than uncertain. It is hard to avoid when you are certain that as a customer you ARE always right. It is harder when you are told you ARE always right, mostly about everything in advertising. Societal resentment and "take-that" reactions result when small uncertainties scratch the surface of certainty's exterior. Resentment and crude behavior reign king over patience, lessons, gratitude and wisdom. They reign king over and suppress discovery, engaged work and trust. Worse yet they reign king over decency and devalue differences because certainty desperately craves others to be more or less the same as itself. Certainty craves uniformity. Certainty craves a miracle of science -scaled, processed and flawlessly consistent.
I still don't have a business idea for this one yet. I can't post this until I do. Rules, stupid self imposed rules!
Ok, I am sick of looking at this post so I'm gonna weasel out of this one with a consulting service idea. The professional services company would consult on, you guessed it, uncertainty. Specifically, it'd be a gang of uncertainty prototypin bad asses who'd teach your company how to deal in tough times. They would help you run "OMG" scenarios and teach your managers how to talk other managers, employees, customers and suppliers down off the cliff. They would train with the best in crisis management and provide services to both public and private entities. Think SWAT or Fire Fighters of the corporate world! This companies primary mission would be to help you realize where the status quo has taken over and develop and deploy targeted uncertainty games to help your team learn from hard lessons while staying engaged and authentic.
The hook is this team would not simply teach preparedness and crisis management it would also focus heavily on traditional leadership training. A major focal point would be placed on self organization and team autonomy. Leaders would be taught how to embrace uncertainty and build great products and services around the full range of circumstances that frame our human response. They'll be given tools and methods to guide with faith (embracing and learning from the unknown or unknowable) while fostering trust in every action. A hard work ethos slanted towards patience, decency and wisdom rather than cut-throat work-hard, play-hard, take-that attitudes will be the soul of the business.
Wooooooo, there. DONE! Finally.
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