How to work in conditions of uncertainty?
By: Denis Nushtaev
Tags: Startup, Utopia, Amai

How to work in conditions of uncertainty?

The most cherished and oldest dream of mankind is to learn how to create social systems, which can work. Working means being predictable and living according to the scenario that we set. We are naively convinced that the skill of creating such systems will save us from violence, war, disease, poverty and sadness.

In fact, the opposite is true: in attempts to create such systems, people are willing to fight and feel sad, because any formalization (systematization, categorization, and other “-zation”) kills living processes. We count metrics, optimize all sorts of processes, and hold endless meetings, while ignoring the fact that we are surrounded by very uncertain conditions.

😬How formalization deceives us

Everyone’s favorite way to avoid uncertainty is to formalize processes. An illustrative example of the victory of formalization over truth is a series of experiments on mice called “Universe 25”. Briefly about the experiment:

Four mice were placed in a paddock with an unlimited supply of food and good conditions, after which they bred their colony. However, after a while, they began to behave “strangely” (they stopped eating, fell into depression, and often observed phenomenon among them was homosexuality). As a result, they died out in these “ideal” conditions.

The problem here is the omission of a large number of factors that form a living process, rather than a formal one. In the experiment with mice, all natural conditions were reduced as much as possible: the unlimited territory; the natural extinction factor, which in real life helps other mice to survive; natural threats that are important at the stage of upbringing (mice were already born in “ideal” conditions), and many other factors. The author of the experiment tried to draw a direct analogy with human society, but in this experiment the living process is missed and therefore the conclusions only superficially resemble something similar to society, by being a beautiful lie. But ultimately, this experiment is more “about the behavior of mice in a paddock.”

👔Corporate selfishness

A sign of a flawed formalized system is focusing on yourself. Take a group of people who, for some reason, decided that beans grown in Kenya improve health. They launched their startup and began to prove to people the importance of their beans: they provided statistics, research, and expert opinions about their product. You’ve met such companies, haven’t you?

Moralizers focus on the belief in the importance of something: “This is useful! Don’t you understand?” But, the beauty of human thinking is the ability to determine what a person needs. Therefore, any training to convince a person to “be smarter, better, more successful” is so flawed.

Technology could simplify the relationships between employees, but instead, IT patterns are actively transferred to the relationships between people in companies.

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In such systems, the task is a set of formal indicators that we agreed on in advance, but not real indicators that are always obvious. It turns out that we are trying to maintain a vicious system by constantly introducing “scrum-kanban-agile”, and not changing the focus on what is behind the walls of the office.

Work with unfamiliarity

Formalization does not work with the process itself, but with a process model that takes in our imperfect view of the world. Each model hides an internal “live” process. For example, it is not the state that works, but a culture with a complex structure of laws from different fields of knowledge: society, finance, geopolitics, etc. One article that we translated earlier, using the example of creating IT products, describes how to correctly prioritize tasks in conditions of uncertainty:

“We have noticed that very rarely products are created with a pure vision. We all try to create great things throughout our careers, but we never have a clear path. In the process, we constantly correlate our hypotheses and the harsh conditions that the project faces in order to create products in accordance with our vision” — Radkiha Dutt.

These guys offer their solution. Probably, there are many similar methods, but you can ask two simple questions that help you focus:

What kind of live process are you working with?

It is important to remember that the living process is changeable and much bigger than you. It does not live in a vacuum and is not formalized.

It is important to remember that the living process is changeable and much bigger than you. It does not live in a vacuum and is not formalized. What don’t you know?

Knowledge can never be a vector of movement that will allow us to change — not to mention the fact that we rarely (or never) have stable knowledge. If we talk about business, then most likely, everyone around us already has the same knowledge for some magical reasons. Ignorance sets the vector.

After answering these questions, you will determine the vector and understand how much you are changing the sphere. It is about the sphere, not yourself — stop thinking about yourself! If you measure your effectiveness by the impact on the external world, rather than on the internal world — you will have more objective performance indicators and it will be easier for you to move in research/in the market. There are some useful results that you will get if you follow this path: