Domesticated Uncertainty

Life is uncertain at best; at worst it is downright terrifying. Especially if it’s your job to decide what new course your business should take. And as you know, if you are a CEO or marketing director, it is that wild uncertainty that makes your business life so exciting, sometimes too much so, and so difficult to tame.

In his book The Black Swan—The Impact of the Highly Improbable, Nassim Nicholas Taleb details his position that uncertainty is something we should embrace; that preparedness, not predictability, is what we should seek; and that we can deal with almost anything if we’re willing to calculate the consequences. (At least that’s my take on the book. I highly recommend you read it and draw your own conclusions.)

The symbolic lesson of the black swan (and the central theme of the book) comes from the bird itself. As the author notes in the first sentence of his book, “people believed all swans were white until black swans were discovered in Australia.” Empirical evidence had only confirmed the existence of white swans; therefore, a black swan was outside the realm of fact, and thus highly improbable. An artist may have thought of one, and even painted one, but no scientist had ever seen one.

The black swan event, as he describes it, is that highly improbably massive event, like the attack of 9/11, or any severe stock market crash, or when a turkey finds out in surprising and deadly fashion that Thanksgiving has come. These black swan events are generally impossible to predict and extremely impossible to prevent.

Mr. Talib sums up the significance of the black swan lesson with the following statement: “It illustrates a severe limitation to our learning from observations or experiences and the fragility of our knowledge.”

When I came upon that statement, I realized that Taleb was describing the need for exactly what we are addressing with CultureWaves™. 

CultureWaves is designed as a continuous process for taming wild, random and often-unmanageable information in an uncertain world. As we collect tangible evidence and observations from human experience and then connect it through something we call intuitive science, we are preparing people and companies to deal more effectively with uncertainty and to be more confident in making decisions. 

The need, as pointed out in Taleb’s book, is to be prepared. Being prepared to manage and profit from the uncertainty and randomness of life is far more beneficial than banking on what is often falsely sold as a prediction. Connecting the randomness of life and putting the abstract into context is something we’re doing every day. We don’t promise predictions, but we are able to demonstrate ways to use it to be first in the market faster, or second with a better idea.

The way we’re approaching the taming of uncertainty is to keep a constant and nonjudgmental eye on life as it exists based on emerging behavior. Certain behavior is repeatable and scaleable, especially if it is fulfilling a growing and inextinguishable human need. Patterns form, emerge and decline. Instead of making predictions, we watch; and in watching we see further faster.

Our systematic, scientific process allows for the confirmation of intuition, disproves conventional thinking, and opens access to random new bits of knowledge, which can then be connected in new and highly creative ways.

Taleb’s book points to the need for all of us to see beyond the noisy crowds, to look for the silent evidence many never consider and, more important, to have the ability to put seemingly random evidence into new and relevant forms. On page 256 of his book he says, “In the end it is those who derive consequences and seize the importance of the ideas, seeing their real value, who win the day.”

We humans generally are unwilling to learn that what we see is not always all there is. And we are blinded by the belief that what we know is vast. The fact is, “the great unknown” is getting greater all the time. What we don’t know is staggering. And unlearning what has gotten us this far may very well be the answer to gaining a preferable future.

Uncertainty is wild, random and highly abstract. It should not be feared since it cannot be predicted. The same “black swan” factor that brings us devastating tragedies also brings us things such as the invention of the wheel, penicillin and the internet. These valuable “surprises” cannot really be planned, but organizations can prepare to allow them to happen. You can look for the gray swan.

Toward the end of his book, Taleb talks about grey swans. If a white swan is a known but sometimes misleading fact, and a black swan is a blindsiding improbability—something no one can ever predict—then I see a gray swan as being a reasonable goal. It’s not a dead fact or a terrifying surprise; it’s something you can use to make a better-informed business decision. That’s not putting wild uncertainty in a cage, but it does housebreak it. And if you can live with domesticated uncertainty, you just might be able to benefit from it.

That’s it, from the edge of the world.

Bob