How to engage your system amidst uncertainty
A guide for working with uncertainty.
Last week, I outlined how to determine if you’re dealing with a complex system, which behave in unpredictable and uncertain ways, and wherein participants adapt to each other’s actions. Today, I’m sharing a Guide that will help you engage your system amidst uncertainty.
Uncertainty is uncomfortable. We don’t like it. We want to control it. As a result, we often conflate it with risk so that we can ‘manage it.’ But, as Vaughn Tan makes clear, risk is the management of an unknowable thing; whereas uncertainty is more akin to ‘not knowing’ or when you can’t manage that unknowable thing. This is a subtle but important difference because we get in trouble when we mistake the two. For example, as I’ve argued in the past, ‘AI alignment’ work is predicated on the idea that we can align AI with our needs and wants — gotta stop those robots from going rogue! But we hold conflicting values and needs that cannot be optimized away. In this way, alignment isn’t a risk companies can manage, it’s true uncertainty hiding in plain sight.
In mistaking uncertainty for risk, we play a dangerous game. We start to behave as if we just know what to do; that all we need are experts making analytical, reasoned decisions. But if we’re dealing with true uncertainty, we need collectives that bridge across different sectors and areas of expertise (more on this in a future Guide!) and constraints. As Alicia Juarrero explains in Context Changes Everything, constraints are “entities, processes, events, relations, or conditions that raise or lower barrier to energy flow.” In short, constraints modify the context by which decisions are made, actions are taken, information is shared, behaviors are expressed, etc.
I’ve never liked the term ‘constraint’ because it connotes control, as if we can wrestle back agency from a world of uncertainty. But a constraint is simply a way of shaping your system — it can either be a boundary OR a connection. A constraint-as-boundary might be community guidelines that narrow the scope of how a group engages one another, and patterns new behavior. A constraint-as-connection could be a new multi-disciplinary working group that brings previously disconnected people together to interrogate a specific problem. Removing existing constraints and/or introducing new constraints are a way of making certain pathways more probable. As Juarrero puts it:
“Constraints sculpt a rugged and multidimensional landscape, the possibility and probability space of what can happen at all, what will most likely happen, and when it cannot, can or must happen.”
Constraints start to pattern new behaviors, values, practices, and ways of seeing — they shape what people will and will not do. Working with them — mapping and adapting your constraints, and creating new ones! — is key to shaping your system amidst uncertainty.
Free Workshop Today
At 3 pm PT, I’m hosting my first Untangled workshop on how to see data as socially constructed, and what it means for you and your work.
Approaches
Interrogate uncertainty in your system
List the causal statements stakeholders in your system make.
What assumptions might underpin those statements?
What values and/or interests might underpin those statements?
What about these causal statements are unknown or incomplete?
Map, Adapt, and Create Constraints
What are the constraints that currently shape the behavior of your system?Observe how people behave in your system, how decisions are made, how information is shared, etc. and map those backward to identify the possible constraints.
How might these existing constraints be adapted to encourage new practices and norms?
What new constraints might you put in place to mitigate uncertainty and pattern new behaviors, create new connections, or new ways of seeing?
The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty; not knowing what comes next - Ursula K. Le Guin