My 4-year-old daughter loves to visit the Science Museum. Her favourite experiment is a big glass cube with sand at the bottom reproducing the behaviour of the sea bedding when seismic movement occurs. This experiment is called “Uncertainty”. The descriptive panel by the experiment details that, in the old times, human beings were exposed to huge uncertainty due to external factors (weather, diseases, etc.) meanwhile, nowadays, uncertainty is mainly caused by humans themselves. That made me shiver the first time I read it.
Organisationally speaking, Uncertainty is one of the four pillars (together with Volatility, Complexity and Ambiguity) of the famous VUCA environment we live in. And, as the big VUCA fan I am, my first perception of the “Uncertainty” concept is always as a positive value. In my optimistic vision of the scenario, I can define it as a state of mind linked to the expectation or emotion when something new happens. It’s similar to what you feel before unwrapping a present or beginning a journey. It is the promise behind something different. This is definitely my favourite mantra: The best is yet to come.
But, unfortunately, as much as I hate to admit it, there is another perspective of “Uncertainty” which is not precisely the one of my beloved VUCA world. Uncertainty is the anxiety people feel when, in an organisation, a big talent with big results is fired due to somebody else’s ego. Uncertainty is the big question mark in everybody’s brain when a brand with a great product is not able to listen and connect with its client to achieve sales. Uncertainty is that puzzling feeling when you see a board of directors who “buy” a transformation programme without being aware that operations transformed by themselves two years ago (buy they didn’t notice it from their offices). Uncertainty is the sadness to realise that, in some companies, people are more focused in thinking who and how should they CC in their mails in order not to upset the thin skins than in making things happen.
Definitely, this is also Uncertainty, but there is nothing positive about it. In short, the negative Uncertainty is the one that appears when ego-driven actions take place and make people feel fragile and vulnerable.
If we look back in history (it doesn’t matter how far back we go), we will see that egos are behind the biggest failures of humans (not only social, but also businesswise). Just the opposite, behind the biggest successes and achievements, there’s a clear collective, shared purpose. Maybe, there lies the key to transform anxious uncertainty into positive expectation: moving from collectives managed by individual egos to empowered communities ready to contribute in a transcendent way. I trust my optimistic feeling and my faith towards people and I know we are taking this road step by step. Because, all in all, everybody prefers the positive version of Uncertainty against the negative one.
