I’ve been reading a lot recently about the fundamental unknowability of the universe. I’d like to include a tip or two in my book on the topic, but truly, I’m at a loss. So I’m turning to you, in the hopes you can share some ideas.
When we’re doing something we’ve done before, or trying to do the same thing others have done before, we have many tools: we can set goals, we can break the goals down into subtasks, we can do research, look at statistics and trends, and try to predict the future. This is the thrust of our education (MBA education, at least), and is generally accepted wisdom.
Some things in the world are risky. They’re unknown. For example, should I accept the job offer from company X? With some careful framing of the question, a few phone calls, and some due diligence, I can at least get a good idea of what it might be like to work for company X.
Other things in the world are uncertain. They are fundamentally unknowable. Either they’re completely new so the human race lacks the past experience to know them, or the outcomes are so dependent on so many different things that for all intents and purposes, they’re unknowable. Some unknowables: (in 2003) Will the iPod catch on in the marketplace? Will my current job lead me to the next career step I want? Will global warming cause serious problems for the human race? What will I be doing in my life five years from now?
We sometimes mistake the uncertain/unknowable for the risky/unknown. We believe that saving for retirement is a good thing and we invest using prudent risk models, which is essentially believing that economic future is risky and unknown, but we can control the risk (and thus, it’s knowable to some degree). Then the economy collapses the very year a person retires, and it turns out that while certain market aspects were unknown, the actual result of “saving for retirement” (which must include consideration of the market conditions at the time of retirement) turns out to be unknowable and uncertain.
How do you approach the unknowable in your life? Do you try to plan? Do you get scared and avoid it as best you can? Do you throw yourself into the future with wild abandon?
What are some of the things you believe about how predictable and controllable your life is, and how your approach to life differs (or doesn’t) for the known, the knowable, and the unknowable?
Ah, great question! I’m actually dealing with this right now–I’m preparing to move to Seattle to work in-house for a client. But the client is a start-up, and for technical reasons, all my beautifully orchestrated and organized moving plans might be shifted a month.
At first, this threw me. I like to be organized. I live for OmniFocus. Checking items off my to-do list gives me almost an unnatural high. And now, what, I have to change all my beautiful organization?
And then I remember that I have the words “strength” and “change” tattooed on my body for a reason. It is through our flexibility, our ability to deal with change, that makes us strong as humans. Whether that change be a scheduling one or true adversity, I remember that I do believe that what makes us stronger as humans is our ability to plan, to organize, to prepare–and then, to relax and go with the flow when life doesn’t quite fit into our day planners.
There’s a whole slew of unknowns and I’m a planner.
I break them down into a couple categories, Good, Bad, and Meh.
I hope for the good, lottery winnings, plan for the bad, health insurance, emergency savings accounts, and watch the Meh with grim amusement.
I can’t know if I’ll get a job that fires me in three months after going out of business because the owner ordered 12 lbs of pot to be shipped to him through the mail and ensuing legal fees bankrupt him and the company.
I can’t know if the car I drive off the lot today will lose the transmission tomorrow. I do the best I can in choosing a car, job, etc. After that it’s up to blind chance what happens next. I can’t control that. I can control how I react though. Not having a plan even a vague plan “In the event of an emergency I will…” is too stressful for me.
Iowa gets tornadoes, floods, ice storms, blizzards, and pretty cool thunderstorms. All of which can make roads impassable and houses unlivable for a while. I don’t have a plan for each eventuality but I have a plan for general weather related nightmares. By thinking about it ahead of time I minimize my stress when it does happen. When/If I get to use the plan I can make note of what I need to change for the future events. DOH! I had a radio but no batteries – get one that doesn’t need any.
The good stuff… windfall stuff… planning for that is sort of important too. Otherwise it’s wasted on us and we stand there slack-jawed and may miss an opportunity or, in the case of money, spend it unwisely on something weird that happened to be shiny and nearby when the check clears.
I’m a big planner. It doesn’t take away the fun or make me into a worrier, sort of the opposite in fact. It’s really nice to skate through an emergency because you already know what you’re going to do and be the only one around who hasn’t lost their head.
I still plan, recognizing that something completely different from what I’m planning for may happen. I first encountered this concept while reading history. The military always makes elaborate plans even though the future course of a war is highly unpredictable. But the resources identified and made available to support the plan may then be turned to new uses in dealing with what actually occurs. More recently, I encountered the same issue in developing a disaster recovery plan for my company. There’s a huge spectrum of possible disasters, all having different effects that require different responses. We would have been paralyzed if we had tried to address them all at once. So we started with the most probable type of disaster and developed a suite of tools and policies that would address it. The planning process continued to analyze other types of events but the steps taken under the initial plan would in most cases be at least helpful no matter what happens.
I find it very useful for me to be clear on underlying principles and values – for me personally, for my family, or for my organization. Usually you can use THOSE to figure out which action is more likely to bring you closer to your desired future rather than further away.
The other thing is to rely on your creativity, intelligence, and intuition. Most people are much less confident than they’d like you to believe, so it’s not that you’re the only clueless one in the bunch. So have the courage to think it through and make a choice, and be happy that you did the best you could at the time – even if it ends up being a mistake.
And finally, enjoy the ride. Life isn’t perfect, but that’s part of what makes it interesting. Yeah, the washing machine blew up, but is that really something which will ruin your life? Or is it just another annoyance on this mysterious journey?
My quick and dirty tips for dealing with the unknown: guidelines, precedents, and intuition.
Oh yeah, and a little WWII British poster we plastered the office with on a recent massive project: “Keep calm and carry on.” (http://tiny.cc/2oSWG for examples)
Guidelines, precedent, and intuition are good for dealing with complex problems — those types of problems where the application of one solution will result in a different outcome each time (e.g., raising a child; building a start-up company). The way I got good at dealing with the unknown is by asking myself every time something new comes up: “What have I seen in the past that is even remotely like this? What is the same/different? What did I do then? Did it work then? Would it work now?” Then I act and reflect. As more remotely similar experiences are linked by synapses, this process becomes nearly instantaneous. This is essentially what Gladwell calls “thin-slicing” and some more rigorous academics studying how experts make split-second decisions call pattern recognition. Unfortunately, my articles on this subject are all at home, but if you want more info, I’m @nikitafullmoon on Twitter.
In the Marines, it’s grilled into us because there is nothing predictable about combat.
Improvise, Adapt, Overcome.
Every plan is perfect.. until you catch that first right hook that knocks you silly. What happens after that is what really counts.
As such you need to have principles and approaches to things that are part of your core, part of who you are.
If you’re someone who is optimistic and determined, you’ll never had a problem you can’t solve.
If you’re pessimistic and uninterested, you’ll likely never find a problem you can solve.
Nothing goes as planned. It is impossible to “model” real life situations. This is why people love machines and computers. You can create a situation with known variables and control that system. You cannot control life.
Stever,
Complexity is a word that comes to my mind in today’s world and staying flexible is key. I know this is somewhat of a cliche but if we consider that many of the potential issues issues we face are not known, being able to adjust will help. A basic concept worth considering is that complexity of chaos theory is becoming more integrated into the business world. If you make x change what may happen with y and z. and many times what was thought of the change with x, y, and z brings on new issues or variables we had not considered.
Are you confused now? … I am
Ted
twitter/terribleted66
Ted-any thoughts on how to stay flexible when working in an organization where job description and span of control is quite precise? … Chaos theory is interesting because it says that chaotic processes can not be predicted, which means we’re living in an increasingly unpredictable world.
(Actually, system dynamics, put forth in a simplified version in Peter Senge’s The Fifth Discipline, also introduces not only the notion of chaos but the notion the feedback loops and time delays make it almost impossible to understand certain complex systems.)
Stever, you might be interested in this article: http://www.workcomplexity.com/html/andrewpdf/OurWorkingJourney&Stress.pdf
It’s about how people’s different capability levels is what determines how comfortable a person is with the unknown.
Make a plan.
It’s what we do. We make plans. We make plans for knowable and known things, and we don’t stop when the unknowns enter the picture.
On the contrary, we generally make MORE plans when there are unknowns. Contingency plans. Alternatives. Backup plans. Plans A, B, C, and D.
That’s our main survival coping strategy.
The problem is, we often plan for the wrong things.
We plan for things that are unlikely to occur. Sometimes you need to do that to ensure survival.
But sometimes we plan for success that is unlikely. That is, we make a complex plan for a complex path to the future, that gets derailed two steps in. I don’t mean to substitute pessimism — you may still get to your goal, or even someplace better. But all that planning effort is likely to have been wasted.
Sometimes we plan for unlikely failures, too. It’s hard to give examples here, because people’s worries are very individual. But we have all worried about something, say, losing a job, that we really had no action items available in the middle of the night. A more pressing and likely concern might be getting enough sleep to do a good job the next day!
The best plans are the ones which are modular. They apply to a situation, when and if it comes up, without a lot of dependencies.
These closely relate to capabilities. The difference is, modular plans are decisions. They may involve going out and obtaining a capability — for example, instituting a backup system for ones files is a decision to acquire a capability to restore ones files, in the event of a drive failure.
The modular plan here has two parts, one likely, but benign, and one unlikely but critical:
1) If I have critical files — back them up. So that…
2) If I lose critical files, restore them from backup.
Implementing #1 gives me the capability to implement #2.
Education, skills, tools, resources, contacts, networks, employee development, agile management practices, PRACTICE at agile practices, empowering people to make decisions — all of these build capabilities, and capabilities enable more modular plans.
And modular plans allow for simpler plans. They allow us to cut through the complexity of long chains of “what if”, and “what if THIS and THAT, but WE CAN’T…”
The result looks like less planning, but it’s not. It’s more organized plans. Instead of a plan for what happens if a single person leaves the company — develop a BROAD plan to ensure broader knowledge capture and sharing — succession plans, wikis, pair programming, cross training. Don’t plan specifically for floods. If you have the capability to set up shop somewhere else, with all your business-critical data, that’s a capability, and it works for tornadoes and earthquakes and epidemics and civil unrest and sabotaged fiber optic cables.
I think perhaps the most important capability, is the capability of quickly replacing a failing plan with a new one. Sometimes the bottleneck is recognizing the failure (visibility!), sometimes it is reaching a decision (for example, analysis paralysis), and sometimes it is organizational inertia. That’s really where agile focuses. But I think agile teams often under-develop capabilities. If it’s not a user story on the board, it may get neglected. But developing a capability — say, refactoring a data model to consolidate, give consistency, and eliminate redundancy — can save enormous time, and give the capability of quickly making responding to future stories.
But, of course, YAGNI may apply — you may not need to do it. It may be one of those plans, for which stories never arrive benefit from the capability. So you have to use judgment. But it’s been my experience that for certain types of things, either you ARE going to need it, or you develop capabilities that come in handy anyway. Maybe you don’t use the new flexibility — but the clearer understanding allows you to better write test cases.
But recently, my boss and I tackled similar tasks in two different areas that had originally both been messes. Both had been candidates for a long time of some major refactoring. I was lucky — mine was in an area that actually had been refactored, and my task took a couple hours. His took days, with major risks and struggle — and the need for refactoring is largely still there!
So in software, look for capabilities in major interfaces — not just what is needed for a single user story. That’s architecture, really — identifying a sensible unit of capability to define. Look for clearly drawn roles and sets of functionality, which can quickly be drawn upon and extended at need, to meet likely RANGES of user stories which are likely. By all means, defer implementations under YAGNI. And don’t try to identify every bit of functionality, either. But try to establish things like “This object here is responsible for all user requests. We should have the capability to quickly add new requests, without having to touch existing callers or maintaining a central list of request types”.
In management, look for capabilities in teamwork and the ability to quickly create a specific process around a new situation. Look for capabilities in tools (of all types) and in employee skills. Look for relationships with vendors and consultants with domain expertise. Look for capabilities that can be matched to identifiable risks.
Then when plans A, B, C, and D have all been shot out of the water, you can come up with plan E. Risk of network problems? You have hired network engineers. Risk of problems with a vendor’s product? Know who to call for help, with the vendor or on a consulting basis.
If your a programmer, the risk may be that Marketing comes to you with an urgent need for the new corporate direction to get the company through the hard times. That’s where that refactored interface, those test cases, that automated build process, that time spent reading the API documentation, or taking those classes, or writing up critical information on the wiki — that’s where all that will pay off.
Finally, a word about guidelines, precedents, and policies. (It should be obvious by now I owe a debt to each of the contributors above!) I’ve long considered guidelines and policies as a form of “pre-made decision”. They can be very useful, and very dangerous.
I think it best to think of them as “modular plans” as I outlined above.
They can be very useful because they can save enormous time. The more time and effort that goes into making a particular decision, the more more useful it is to pre-make that decision. They can also help ensure consistency (for example, legal precedent helps maintain fairness via consistency). And they can also enable incremental refinement and thus improve the quality of decisions. This is reflected in medical treatment guidelines, for example.
But they can also go horribly wrong if they become straightjackets, as often happens in a bureaucracy. Because a pre-made decision implies a degree of knowledge about future situations, and often don’t work when the unexpected hits. “Treat the patient with drug X — but he’s in liver failure, and can’t metabolize drug X”. The following the guideline rather than proceeding on seat-of-the-pants may save 1000 lives a day, backed up by rigorous studies — but following it might kill this patient.
Better that, than losing the other 1000, but it’s not necessary to kill this one, either.
So guidelines, etc. have their place. But that places is not directly in the area of the “unknown and unknowable”. Rather, they help to clear the landscape, so you can focus your attention on the unique new problem. The solution MAY be to throw out one of the old guidelines! Yet you may already have benefited from having all those other modular plans for the other parts of the situation, rather than having to work out an entire, complex, detailed plan.
I really like nikitafullmoon’s contribution: “Keep calm and carry on.”. Not stressing out about not being able to do things the way you expected is key to a good outcome. That means, LET GO of that failed plan. Don’t carry it around as emotional baggage. OK, the economy has tanked, you’ve had a round of layoffs, maybe you’ve updated your resume, but you’re still here, still trying to do your best.
Anger at the situation won’t make it better. Just look for the opportunities that are there in front of you, and make your choices. And keep calm, and carry on.