You hear it ad nauseam when it comes time for the playoffs in major sports. The team that has “chemistry” is the one that often goes on to win the championship, even if their talent level isn’t the best. Chemistry in this case is just another word for culture and it is one of the most important aspects of team dynamics.
“If we hope to go anywhere or develop ourselves in any way, we can only step from where we are standing.” Jon Kabat-Zinn wrote these words in the book Wherever You Go, There You Are, a favorite of mine as an introduction to mindfulness. This sentiment transcends personal and professional boundaries. If we seek meaningful change or progress, we must recognize our existing strengths, limitations, highlights, and blind spots to know what areas to target and determine where to go next. These characteristics represent a foundation upon which all else is built — everything that happens is from now on (another quote; this one from a Bon Iver song).
Maybe this started with COVID, or maybe it was just more in our faces, but the phrases “We are living in unprecedented times,” and “In these uncertain times…” became very common and in my opinion, a bit overplayed, somewhere around 2020. We had “a new normal” that involved masking up, homeschooling our kids, and becoming way too familiar with Zoom meetings.
Eventually, the pandemic subsided and gradually we returned to going to restaurants and stores and going to work and hanging out with the people we love in person.
Fortunately or unfortunately, depending upon your perspective, the Zoom meetings remained, some people decided that home schooling was best to continue, and a lot of companies implemented more flexible work from home policies that focused on actual output instead of time spent chained to a desk.
Fast forward a couple more years and we still continue to hear constantly about our changing times. Here in America, our addiction to extreme politics has left much of the country whipsawing between policies that don’t just modify every couple of years, but reverse, stifling progress and undermining stability.
Artificial Intelligence has infiltrated the market space in an extremely disruptive way. Jobs that we grew up revering will be replaced within the next 5-10 years, leaving our children with an uncertain path forward and wondering whether they should be investing in years of debilitating educational debt at a traditional University or whether they should go to trade school or something similar.
Change brings uncertainty, that is for sure. The changes we are facing are unprecedented, but large scale changes usually are. When things become uncertain we want to reach for the comfort of the past with rose colored glasses, but we have to ask? Was it really any different?
If you were a teenager growing up in the late 30’s and 40’s, whether you were in the United States, Europe, Russia, or Japan, did you have a certain future? My grandfather and many like him certainly did not. They honestly didn’t know if they would see middle age as World War raged on for almost a decade.
The 1800’s had the Civil War and the Industrial Revolution. A stock market crash in the late 20’s, terrorism in the 90’s and early 2000’s and yes even the dreaded high gas prices during the Cold War.
Whether you were one of the first humans to walk the earth or part of Generation Alpha, you were and are living in uncertain and unprecedented times. You better get used to it.
What makes uncertainty so scary? To many, it is the black box of the unknown. When the human brain isn’t sure, it’s programmed on purpose to believe that there is danger there in order to protect itself. But it isn’t the black box itself that is dangerous, it is the potential things that could come out of it that are dangerous.
The interesting thing, and this is coming from someone who studies probabilistic forecasting for a living, is that when all the information is unknown, there are just as many chances that what comes out of the box is extremely positive as it is negative or dangerous.
But we are humans, and we like what we know.
Speaking of the probabilistic forecasting, we can go back to our poker analogy from Annie Duke. You hold the hards in your hand that make up what your life currently consists of. Think of one card as your family, one is your job, your house, your neighborhood etc. You might be looking into a black box, or in this case a deck of cards that you have no idea which one is going to come up next. It’s uncertain, and it’s scary, especially when you have a lot of money on the hand already.
At some point in the hand, you are going to get a new card, new information that sheds some light on the black box that is your future. All of a sudden you have new information from which to make a choice with. If it’s dangerous, you can fold and hang on to what you have. However if the card provides you with new information that could be rewarding, you may want to push more into the hand and lean into the change.
Regardless of what card comes up, you ALWAYS will get new information and new cards to draw from in your life. Which means there will always be a light at the end of the tunnel of whatever uncertainty you are dealing with. You just have to keep walking the path forward.
Our organization is going through a major transformation at the moment. The maps and career paths we thought we had are changing and for a while we didn’t know what the new paths would be. Morale was very low and fear dominated the landscape as the black box of uncertainty reared its ugly head.
Over the past few weeks, new information has started to come to light and interesting things are happening. New career paths and opportunities that weren’t there two weeks ago are suddenly there. Things I thought wouldn’t be possible for ten years are possible much sooner. At the same time, some of the things I am comfortable with and love will remain in place.
While morale in the organization still has a long way to go, there is some easing of the fear simply by receiving new data to go on. People can plan for if they want to be a part of the organization moving forward or if they would like to go in a different direction.
For the reasons discussed above, when taking on organizational change, or any change of larger magnitude in your life, getting new information as quickly as possible and making decisions as quickly as possible to get on the other side of the change is paramount to returning to a steady state where fear subsides and comfort returns. It also allows you to reap the benefits of the change sooner.
A colleague of mine (thanks Matt!) made a great analogy for probabilistic forecasting and I’m going to use it to apply to your life as well.
Picture yourself on a train coming into a rail yard. You are on the track that you are on and the path you took to get here is singular, no matter how winding it may have been. Suddenly you enter the rail yard and there are 100’s of possible tracks in front of you.
After the first switch you realize you are going right and not left and you can rule out about half of the tracks. You keep switching tracks one at a time and narrowing down the field of possibilities until you end up on the singular track where you are meant to be.
Think of each track switch as a decision point in your life that you get to control. You make decisions one at at a time until you get to where you want to go. If you know me, you know that I always say, “There is no wrong decision, only the next decision.”
If you get off of the track that you want to be on, there is going to be another decision point that will allow you to get back closer to that place that you want to be on.
RELATED ARTICLE: Big Changes are Coming to Your Job. Are You Ready?
Change is all around us and constant. It isn’t going away. With that change comes the necessary uncertainty that goes along with it. The interesting thing is that it isn’t new and it’s something humans have had to deal with for all of eternity.
When you stare into that black box of uncertainty, don’t be afraid of it. Embrace it and keep moving forward. There will be a light at the end of the tunnel, and with that light comes the illumination of new information. This information will guide your way through the rail yard that is this messy life we all lead. Make your decisions one at a time with the information that you have and you will find your opportunity. Good chance it’s a better one than you thought.
This post contains affiliate links, for more info see our disclaimer.
Our community grows best by word of mouth. If there is someone you thought of while reading this, please share it with them and encourage them to become a part of our community.
Your support means everything to us to keep our subscriptions free! Please consider buying us a cup of coffee to keep us going! After all, there isn’t anything a good shot of caffeine can’t do. We couldn’t do what we do without your support and generosity. Thank you for making us stronger! We appreciate it!
If you read last week’s three thoughts you already know that recently I had to say goodbye to my cat Charlotte of 17 years. It’s incredible how much attachment we as humans can have to animals and how much they provide for us over the years. Certainly they give us more than we give, when you consider the emotional support and unbending loyalty they they have for their humans.
Our society puts an emphasis on fast. Hustle culture will get you promoted. We look at headlines in the news and make snap judgements without reading the article. We are constantly getting barraged with ads. On average we see about 5000 advertisements a day in one form or another. You don’t have to drive very far down the road from wherever you live in this country to know that America is the fast food capital of the world. Track builders can build a house in mere weeks these days.
Find Keith Sherburn on LinkedIn
Over the holiday season, my wife and I each had two weeks off at home to reflect after a challenging year. She’s a school teacher, so the holiday break is a usual component of her schedule; however, as someone who worked rotating shifts—including holidays, overnights, and everywhere in-between—prior to this year, this was uncharted territory for me. Even when I do have time off, I usually fill it with travel, providing little opportunity for true relaxation and introspection. Aside from a couple of local day trips around the Black Hills, this was a legitimate staycation.
This year I am stepping away from traditional New Year’s goals. I’m not going to lose ten pounds, I’m not going to become fluent in Italian and I am not going to go viral with the Human Constant. Don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t mind doing all of those things but I have had those “resolutions” before and I don’t typically hit the goal, or I forget about it by February and move on to something else.
The end of the year is quickly coming to a close and this is the time of the year that people start to ease into the holidays and take stock of the year that was. While more people are likely to make New Year’s resolutions than look at their year in review, the two are really symbiotic if you want to maximize your momentum going into next year.
I don’t have a selling bone in my body.
I remember as a kid having to sell fundraisers for my school. My customers were my parents and my relatives and that was it out of pure sympathy. It wasn’t like it was a bad product. Anyone remember “World’s Finest Chocolate”? I mean it’s chocolate for heaven’s sake, surely I could sell that. Not a chance.
If you have spent any time online recently, you have probably run across the phrase “toxic positivity” more than once. While toxic positivity certainly is something to be aware of, it seems to me that lately, as the world becomes increasingly negative, there is a drive to label any kind of positivity as toxic.