In response to my article about doubt (A question of doubt and certainty), I was asked the following question on LinkedIn: How do you think organisations can cultivate a culture that welcomes uncertainty?
Estimated reading time: 3 minutes
Institutions bring order
One of the central roles of institutions is to bring order to life which implies limiting uncertainty to a minimum rather than pursuing it. Institutions plan, they organise, they regulate, they account for, they employ, they structure, they make projections about the future. To respond to the challenge mentioned above, the fundamental question is to what extent is an institution prepared to allow or even favour change when its very structure and organisation are dedicated to the contrary.
Controlling innovation
Those institutions, and I include companies as an example of institution, whose role requires them to innovate, try to build structures that keep innovation under control. The most hilarious example I’ve come across is the way the European Union funds research projects. In an effort to guarantee return on investment, researchers are required to state in advance what they expect their outcomes to be and failure to provide those deliverables is sanctioned. Such a bureaucratic approach to research seems unlikely to lead to ground-breaking work, unless, of course, researchers bend the rules…. Another example is the way schools try to channel and sanitise learning using such instruments as the curriculum. Clearly, discovery is not absent from schooling, especially not in the younger years, but learning is increasingly programmed and assessed to the point of asphyxiation as pupils get older, leaving little room or appetite for venturing into the unknown.
Failure as an opportunity
This early apprenticeship of risk aversion, apparently more prevalent in Europe than the States, leads to failure being seen as a serious defect to be avoided at any price rather than a chance to learn. Failure in school, for example, tends to accumulate in the form of increasingly bad marks that blight a pupil’s future. It would appear that one of the answers to Raimone’s question involves lessening the stigma of failure from an early age, especially as it is later embodied in reward systems and institutional culture.
The illusion of the quick fix
Another example of prioritising success over failure is the desire to find quick fixes. By their very nature, they are reassuring and can be easily applied, requiring much less effort and entailing little or no learning. Artificial Intelligence is an ideal tool for providing almost instant gratification thanks to it rapid answers. What’s more, the solutions offered by AI come at the cost of flexibility in that they are built on a mash-up of what exists and cannot embrace the unexpected. They also forfeit innovation, as their solutions are forged solely from past actions and past experience.
Beware the brittle
In response to the fundamental question raised about confronting uncertainty and favouring change, you might well ask, why bother. The simple answer is that any organisation, rather like the human body, needs to be able to respond to unexpected challenges if it is to survive and develop. Trying to keep uncertainty at arms’ length would lead an organisation to become unbending in the face of change making it vulnerable, especially now that the pace of change is constantly accelerating. Any organised way of approaching uncertainty is necessarily bound to be inadequate by definition. But an effort to grant room for chance and uncertainty must be better than the impossible task of barricading against them.