Embrace Uncertainty, You Won’t Be Safe Anymore
By: Jm Piqué
Tags: Ideas, Inspiration, Leadership, Change, Business

You’ll be safe and surrounded by certainties. This is what all of us seek, as a child who expects their parents will always have a solution when they cannot find a way out of a problem. We want to rely on a wild card, a magic formula that does not exist in this Age of Uncertainty, as defined by the economist John Kenneth Galbraith in 1977. Fortune is still present, as it always has been, to bring excitement to everything we do.

Much has been theorized and published about how capitalism is exhausted as a productive system. Or, at least, there’s an ongoing profound transformation, caused, mainly, by the extraordinary advancement of information and telecommunications technologies in recent decades. The global scenario has dramatically changed due to the need to renew the energy model. More than twenty years ago, Peter Drucker already stated that we were facing a paradigm shift, in which “the basic economic resource, the means of production, is no longer capital, natural resources, or labor, but rather knowledge. Today, value is generated by productivity and innovation, which are applications of knowledge to work “. In 2000, Lester Thurow also said that “knowledge is the new basis of wealth. It had never been. In the past, when capitalists spoke of their wealth, they referred to factories, equipment, and natural resources they owned. In the future, when capitalists talk about their wealth, they will mean the control they have over knowledge.”

All this conceptual mess is indeed typical of historical moments when crisis reigns in all senses. Companies find themselves amid an economic, financial, environmental, and social earthquake, in which the number of uncertainties far exceeds that of certainties. However, businesses need to keep going; they must continue operating, changing, and surviving day by day. We wish we could stop the economy for a while to fix it, repair the damaged parts, and fine-tune the machine to face the new situation with guarantees. But this does not seem possible.

We should not forget that change is, actually, our natural state. Zachary Karabell recounted it a few years ago in his blog The Edgy Optimist: “We have reached a critical point in which the model that has been successful so far will not serve for the future. The agricultural society of the 19th century gave way to the industrial of the 20th century, giving way to the economy of services, ideas, and technology in the 21st century. None of those transitions has happened without pain and disruption, and the current transition will be no exception.”

It is complicated to imagine people and organizations that can carry out all these changes without a fundamental element as an engine: motivation, a sense of the in-depth trends, and, ultimately, confidence in one’s abilities in this context. Let’s put it another way: happiness, the feeling of moving forward.

Perhaps that is one of the most significant learnings that we must face in our lives, as individuals and as entrepreneurs: that our decisions will be ours alone, and we will permanently bear the burden of responsibility and consequences. No one will share our mistakes, and everyone will want our successes.

Therefore, we must transform the personal and business mentality, corner the short term, or at least not grant it all the time and space. And at the same time, step by step, look a little further and develop a future project. Obstacles will come no matter what, and maybe something new can be built in the meantime.