Working In Uncertainty

A summary of Working In Uncertainty as a personal and business improvement programme

The central proposal of Working In Uncertainty is simply to make incremental changes to the way you work that help you to understand and/or deal with uncertainty better. The changes are not new ideas and they are not complicated. This often helps because we have a natural tendency to think we can predict and control the future better than we can, so usually underestimate the importance of uncertainty. Obviously, the more good ideas for improvement you learn about the more likely you are to find things that help you.

Scope

These incremental changes could involve anything you think you could usefully change. If you are doing it just for yourself then that could involve daily routines, tools you rely on, habits, and so on. If you are doing it for an organization (anything from a team of two to a large government department) then that could involve all those personal things, plus others you use as a group, such as corporate management systems, computer systems, and so on.

Finding opportunities to improve

Although you should try to approach this in an organized way there is no need to invent an elaborate procedure for generating improvement ideas, selecting them, and doing them. Keep it simple and flexible. Your approach must:

1. focus attention efficiently;

2. generate a strong flow of good ideas for improvements; and

3. focus resources efficiently;

Focusing attention efficiently

What you think would be valuable to do and what you think you could do should interact to arrive at changes that are achievable and useful. Just how useful depends in part of what you focus attention on.

There are many reasons why a change to ways of working might get higher priority. For example:

• the activity it affects is important;

• the changed behaviour is performed often, so learning and benefits will be rapid;

• performance at the activity involved is generally considered poor at present;

• the change responds to an important existing worry;

• a nasty shock has just occurred and the change would make it less likely to happen again;

• the people affected are keen to change rather than reluctant;

• the technique to be used has worked well elsewhere; or

• the technique to be used is expected to bring a great improvement.

Rather than picking just one basis for focusing attention, or trying to assess every activity and every technique on a host of factors, it is probably most efficient to make a quick survey for obvious priorities driven by any of the above. What do people think is likely to be important, on any basis whatsoever?

Another simple but effective way to focus attention is to (1) write down the main facts about what you do and how you currently do it, (2) highlight anything that is distinctive, then (3) think. This works because the main facts, especially those that are distinctive about the way you work, are the ones that should suggest the techniques likely to be most beneficial in dealing with uncertainty.

Still another simple alternative to elaborate prioritization methods is to focus on the ideas people suggest first in answer to questions like "Where is it most important for us to handle uncertainty well?", "Which of our activities are most important?", and "What ideas for improvement stand out already?" The key point is that just taking the first ideas (or until the flow of suggestions dwindles) has a powerful focusing effect and requires no effort to do.

Do not proceed as if nobody has ever thought about the issues before. To illustrate this, imagine you write down an analysis of your major areas of uncertainty. This may help, but of course those are areas where you are most likely to be dealing with uncertainty quite well already because they are a big focus for you.

Generating a strong flow of good ideas for improvements

Without good ideas for improvements it doesn't matter how carefully you have focused attention or how rigorously you select the best ideas; not much value will be achieved. Unless you do something to prime your imagination with good, new ideas you will tend to find that you do a lot of prioritization but still can't think of much worth doing. In contrast, knowing about more good ideas will help you generate more improvements and also increase your ability to spot where uncertainty is important to you.

The most effective approach to boosting the flow of good ideas is to learn more about useful techniques[8,9]. This website offers some and you can sign up to receive more materials from me as they are produced. (At present these are free.) The ideas I recommend are selected specifically because they work well and replace methods that many people use that do not work well. There are also some good books with lots of valuable ideas in them. You can find good ideas in many places.

So, look at ideas from experts and ideas that seemed to work for someone else and see if they might work for you.

Focusing resources efficiently

Ideas for better ways of working in uncertainty are likely to emerge from time to time rather than all being thought of in an initial "analysis and design" phase. Furthermore, once you start working with initial ideas and trying to implement them you will find more and better ideas appearing as people learn from trials.

So, take time initially to generate a number of ideas and to get a sense of how promising they are, typically, and how easy it is to generate more. Then move on to trials of ideas that people are most enthusiastic about, ideally those that are relatively valuable, easy to do, and likely to give quick feedback. Continue responding to what happens after that.

Advantages

The value of better Working In Uncertainty depends on how important uncertainty is for you and how much improvement is possible in your case.

However, many opportunities exist to work better in uncertainty, and that is because of our persistent tendency to think our knowledge is better than in fact it is. We're surprised more often than we should be[15]. This tendency to think we know the future has become institutionalised in many common management methods.

Take budgetary control systems, as just one example. After months of elaborate calculations and tough negotiations, many budgets are agreed only to become obsolete within a very few months[6]. Budgets are an institutionalised assumption that the future can be predicted and controlled.

Or take the idea of setting specific personal goals and persistently working towards them. We hear this advice so often that we hardly notice its underlying assumptions that we know what will make us happy (we don't) and we know what will be possible for us (we don't). But, for every Arnold Schwarzenegger who had a dream, stuck with it, and ultimately lived it, there are dozens who try just as hard and fail, and hundreds who try for a while then realise it's not working and they should try something else.

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