Comments on: Accepting Discomfort as We Navigate Uncertainty

By: Christine Egger

Christine Egger — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 19:38:54 +0000

Sean, fun to chase these thoughts with you. Not surprisingly perhaps, no, Rumsfeld’s comment doesn’t address the point I was trying to make, which is that much of what is unknown CAN’T be known, and a whole different set of strategies is required for dealing with that subset of all unknown stuff — stuff that’s uncertain by definition.

By: Sean Stannard-Stockton

Sean Stannard-Stockton — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 15:40:06 +0000

Thanks Christine,
Interestingly, Donald Rumsfeld has something to say on this issue:

“There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know.”

It seems to me that “known unknowns” are the things you say we should work on knowing. But we must always remember that there are “unknown unknowns” and we must embrace the fact that we will always operate under conditions of “unknown unknowns”

By: Jeff Mowatt

Jeff Mowatt — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 19:08:01 +0000

Sean,

In answer to your final question, psychology was very much an influence on the for profit model we describe as people-centered economics. It was I’m told, influenced by Maslow and Carl R Rogers, who proposed that given the chance people had the innate capacity to understand their issues, heal themselves, and become a healthy, functioning person.

I’d just been reflecting that I was first drawn here a year ago by your slightly provocactive suggestion that social entprise caused the credit crisis, My aim was to convey the for profit approach which advocates for achievement measured in human progress rather than debt measured in abstract numbers. Now I understand that Tactical Philanthropy has itself adopted a for profit approach.

Our own risk an uncertainty derives from working in an area in which organised crime is the main obstacle. Risk is physical as is taking a maverick position which is bound to draw flak. This is something still largely ignored by both philanthropy and social enterprise, i.e the counter influence of (anti)social capitalism where often human life is the commodity.

Jeff

By: Christine Egger

Christine Egger — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 19:11:15 +0000

Sean, thanks for asking what I think are key questions at the end of your post. As for the first one, how to know what that feeling of uncertainty is telling you, one helpful exercise is to distinguish between two kinds of uncertainty. The first is a matter of what ISN’T known; the second is a matter of what CANNOT be known. Both are ubiquitous to philanthropy. There’s always more than could be known about the entire context that defines a philanthropic opportunity, and uncertainty is a characteristic of all social situations (imho).

Problematizing and fixing uncertainty in the first case makes sense (“The fact that we don’t know X is a problem. Let’s do what needs to be done to fill in the missing information.”) Problematizing and fixing uncertainty in the second case doesn’t. That’s where the advice to accept or embrace it is well-placed. (“Not knowing X is a side-effect of what X is. Let’s accept that and decide where to go from here.”)

In exploring your second question (“What can we learn from others who’ve been grappling with uncertainty longer than we have?”), I like theoretical physicist F David Peat’s suggestions that you can create (or look for, if analyzing and risk-assessing) certain conditions that encourage those positive outcomes. Here’s a link to a list of those conditions, and some additional background info:

http://christineegger.soup.io/post/10414651/Characteristics-of-Gentle-Action

By: Sean Stannard-Stockton

Sean Stannard-Stockton — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 17:17:59 +0000

Very good point. I took the tact of saying we should accept discomfort to get comfortable with uncertainty, but I think you’ve put it a better way. Accepting uncertainty makes the discomfort go away. To stretch the Zen thinking, accepting suffering makes suffering stop being painful.

Thanks Laura.

By: Laura Deaton

Laura Deaton — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 16:19:58 +0000

Hi, Sean – Good post! I’d take it one step further, though, and suggest that if we actually embrace uncertainty, then a certain amount of the discomfort goes away, freeing us to also embrace the challenges of navigating without answers, and the opportunity to create a chart a real, new future. As Hildy Gottlieb says in the recently published Pollyanna Principles, “We are creating the future, right now, with every decision we make, with every word we speak, with every action we take.” That said, the future is always uncertain, and I find that exciting!