A pitch of uncertainty at the right time
Uncertainty is on the rise. If organizations want to be prepared for possible futures, they need to deal with uncertainty. How do you develop your organization’s culture so you keep learning, innovating, and changing to be ready for anything? Let’s learn from Fluidigm, ASML, Match.com, and the wind energy industry.
The world is more VUCA than before - and the rate of technological change is accelerating. How do we improve our uncertainty skills? Let’s learn from Nathan Furr and Susannah Harmon Furr, who wrote the inspiring and practical book “The Upside of Uncertainty: A Guide to Finding Possibility in the Unknown”.
How do organizations respond to uncertainty? Ironically, most organizations organize to create certainty and avoid deviance from the norms. They put in their resources, process these to add value and produce their output (products or services) that makes them money. This process needs to be efficient, predictable, manageable, and effective. However, inserting the right amount of uncertainty at the right time keeps organizations learning and makes them more resilient in the long run.
Organizing for certainty
When organizing, you reduce uncertainty. Nathan and Susannah share the research in their book:
“A study by researchers at Harvard Business School found that when companies in the photography and paint industry implemented quality management systems like ISO 9000, they succeeded in managing for better quality, but actually decreased their ability to innovate and create new growth.
Likewise, a recent field experiment, also done at Harvard, showed that participants at a hackathon who held more frequent meetings (e.g., stand-up meetings) increased their coordination but decreased their innovativeness.
By contrast, a separate research project studying the world's top culinary teams observed that the most innovative ones purposely inject more uncertainty into the process to activate and unlock new ideas.
Scholars doing work on uncertainty talk about "endogenous uncertainty," or the idea that new opportunities can actually be created by choosing to increase uncertainty, rather than the more common approach of reducing uncertainty. For example, whereas Blockbuster tried to use proven strategies to respond to changing technologies and failed, Netflix actually increased the uncertainty by exploring multiple new options, which contributed to its becoming one of the world's most valuable companies.”
The question is: What would it mean to activate and unlock, rather than to manage and control, the uncertainty? A bit of uncertainty stimulates learning, creativity, new possibilities, and effective responses to the VUCA world.
Organizational culture and uncertainty
That question is not easy to answer, and in some organizations, it’s impossible to ask this question. That’s because organizational culture determines what is normal around here. It influences how we think, and what we say and do.
In the Competing Values Framework that models organizational culture (the organizing processes - the way we do things around here), you can focus either more on the results or the people who produce the results (Collaborate versus Compete culture). Or you focus more on the risks you want to avoid versus the unknowns you are willing to navigate to achieve your goals (Control versus Create culture).
See the more extensive description of the four culture types here.
Though organizations need the features of all culture types to be successful in the long run, the Create culture type is a good fit for addressing the Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous VUCA world. You can read more about developing a Create or learning culture in my book Developing a Positive Culture.
The Create culture is a dynamic and creative working environment. Key features are:
Do new things: create, innovate, envision the future
Transformational Change
Handle discontinuity, change, and risk
Freedom of thought and action, rule-breaking
Thoughtful experimentation, learning from mistakes, failing fast
Roles like entrepreneurs and visionaries, not afraid of uncertainty
Becoming future-prepared and competent at navigating uncertainty entails developing the right mindset the right culture, and the right practices. Nathan Furr and Susannah Harmon Furr share great tips, tools, and examples in their book. For example, what can you apply in your organization from the below examples:
Keep an open mind
In uncertain circumstances, the solution, according to organization theorist Karl Weick, is to adopt an attitude of wisdom. "In a fluid world, wise people know that they don't fully understand what is happening right now, because they have never seen precisely this event before.”
A wise person thus believes in what they know just enough to take action but doubts what they know just enough to take other voices into account. By contrast, the overconfident shun curiosity because they feel they know most of what there is to know. The overcautious shun curiosity for fear it will only deepen their uncertainties.
How can you keep an open mind and stay curious?
Know your risks
Mapping your risk affinities can help you keep an open mind. Most people are attracted to some types of risks but are averse to others. Knowing your risk profile helps you fortify where you feel weak and make the most of your affinities. This goes for organizations as well.
Tina Seelig's risk-o-meter can help your team.
First, brainstorm the different risk labels for your organization, like: intellectual, social, psychological, financial, political, operational, innovation risk, and so forth. Intellectual risk might mean the ability to be intellectually honest. Psychological risk could mean the psychological safety of the organization, and so on.
Write the labels down around a circle and ask each team member to score the organization’s affinity (on a scale from 1 to 10) for each kind of (operational, intellectual, financial, etc) risk.
Next, have a dialogue about this. Some risks may have mixed blessings. For example, a high operational risk tolerance could facilitate innovation but could also expose you to mistakes. Recognizing the collective risk profile helps to have richer conversations about how to address what may be helping or holding your organization back.
Identify your unknowns
Identifying what you know and what you don't know is also helpful. Use the blind spot matrix, a.k.a. the Johari window to discuss them with your team. One axis maps out if something is known or unknown to you, and the other maps if it is known or unknown to others.
First, there are Known-knowns to you and others (lower left quadrant): probable risks that you can prepare for. For the variables unknown to you but known to others (upper left quadrant), search out the experts who have the information. For the variables you are aware of but whose outcomes can't be known (lower right quadrant), a good analogy can help make sense of the situation. There are also things that are off everyone's radar (the upper right quadrant) that will only be discovered through experimentation or over time.
For what risks can you use this with your team?
Accelerate learning in small groups
Martin van den Brink, who led one of the most challenging breakthroughs in semiconductor manufacturing at ASML, says navigating uncertainty is like driving a car in difficult conditions: "It is foggy and dark. There are a few folks with red lights ahead of you, and you are driving as fast as you can. But as you start to get more successful, you are in front. There are no more lights in front, and you have no clue what to do.” How do you navigate through the fog?
One solution is to introduce Fast Cycles like in Accelerators for startups. For an indeterminate period, accelerators accept a group of startups (a class) for a fixed period (typically three months), give them enough money to survive (on ramen noodles) in exchange for equity, and coach them until a final demo day, when they pitch to external investors for funding.
How can you organize fast learning groups that can learn and accelerate in your organization?
Fail fast forward
CEO Sam Yagan of Match.com once said: “By definition, grand achievements cannot be achieved without failure. If you can do it without failing, it is not that hard. Therefore, you must fail to achieve great things." Next, the Match.com teams tried and failed seventeen times to create a new business model until they discovered Tinder, which after many experiments and iterations disrupted the parent company, attracting six times as many users and becoming the new paradigm in the field.
The thing is that because we hate to fail, we often avoid uncertain situations where great things could happen.
How can you make “failing” easier in your organization? Can you reframe it as learning new information? Can you incentivize learning from new information?
Experiment and share
Nathan and Susannah share a great example of the US and Danish approach to creating the sustainable wind energy industry.
Danish companies adopted a "get started with what we have" approach, cobbling together wind turbines from gears pillaged from trucks and wood panels to quickly deploy prototypes in the field and jumpstart a cycle of trial-and-error iteration.
Moreover, they did it in the spirit of collaboration, with engineers helping each other solve problems, learning from customers what worked, and cooperating with regulators to make sure their turbines were safe. Rather than keep their advances secret, the Danes started conferences to share information with each other. The crude wind turbines evolved into sophisticated ones.
In contrast, US firms adopted a high-tech, science-based approach, relying on the latest theoretical thinking in aeronautics in hopes of creating breakthroughs in the lab that, they assumed, would leapfrog the Danes' simpler methods. Many US engineers looked down on the scrappy Danish wind industry.
Fearing their ideas might be stolen, US engineers avoided collaboration, and there was a spirit of disdain for the nuts and bolts of installing and operating turbines, which meant there was almost no feedback from customers to the labs.
In the end, even though the US companies made several breakthroughs, the Danish turbines were often already ahead or caught up so quickly that the breakthroughs were on par. But there was one crucial difference between the US and Danish wind turbines: the Danish designs were much cheaper and more reliable than the US ones. Through trial-and-error, the Danish companies solved one of the most challenging technical puzzles of their era and dominated the emerging wind energy industry.
How and where in your organization can you make this experimental, hands-on, and collaborative approach the “new normal”?
Pivot and change course
Your strategy is not set in stone! As Reid Hoffmann, PayPal's first chief operating officer (and who later founded LinkedIn) recalls, "I couldn't have drawn a road map. We discovered our future as it happened."
Pivoting is something every company has to do, whether they are software startups or hard-science companies like Fluidigm, which shrunk a chemical testing laboratory down to the size of a chip. On this journey, Fluidigm founder Gajus Worthington had to lead this company through three major changes: from microfabricated plumbing chips to a microfluidic device for biotech applications, then to a microfluidic chip applicable across many industries, and finally to being a commercial manufacturer. Each change required immense organizational and personal change. Looking back, Worthington observes that "people who are able to adapt have an allegiance to learning, to self-improvement, to the mission of the company."
Pivoting isn't about abandoning the course but instead about using what you learned to adjust your course.
Is your strategy a “holy path carved in stone”? How can you stay open to new information, learn, and adjust your course?
- What is the right amount of uncertainty at what time for your organization?
© Marcella Bremer, 2025
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