Embrace Uncertainty
November 20th, 2002 by HalA few of my colleagues and friends were given a book coauthored by Robert J. De Koch, COO of The Boldt Company and Phillip G. Clampitt, Ph. D., Professor, University of Wisconsin. The book is titled Embracing Uncertainty: The Essence of Leadership. It might as well have been titled Succeeding on Projects. One friend and colleague mentioned the book in a comment on an earlier posting about uncertainty. Get the book. This book is a winner. I will write about the authors' views and the relevance to projects for the next few days. I am also adding the book to a new listing of Books (look for a new blogroll on the weblog).
The authors claim "it is better to embrace uncertainty than to eliminate it." They go on to say there are issues for which leaders don't have answers AND there is a sledgehammer-like requirement for knowing even in the face of no one can know. They offer six propositions for managing in our uncertain world:
- Embracing uncertainty enhances the quality of life for employees and organizations.
- There are some powerful forces that make it difficult or socially unacceptable to embrace uncertainty.
- There is a lot more uncertainty in the world than ever gets acknowledged.
- People and organizations spend a lot of time creating the appearance, not the reality, of certainty.
- The illusions of certainty are pervasive and often debilitating. The problem is getting worse, not better.
- There are effective ways to embrace uncertainty in your lives and organizations.
The book is refreshing in the possibility of embracing that which we all know is so — the future is uncertain and unknowable — will lead directly to new patterns and practices for coping and thriving in our endeavors.
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November 20th, 2002 at 5:31 pm
right on hal… thanks for the recommendation.
December 8th, 2002 at 3:52 am
Education systems over the past century and a half have reinforced an empirical approach to even social constructs. Cause and effect analysis only begets fault finding and guilt in social scenarios. Where we find ourselves focused on the cause and therefore the fault of the variance, then we are ill suited for embracing uncertainty…much less chaos.