Chapter 1: Under-Certainty
How to understand your macro-environment as a finite list of lesser-knowns, instead of the infinite void of uncertainty.
“A little knowledge that acts is worth much knowledge that is idle.”
— Khalil Gibran
What will I learn in this chapter?
You’ll learn how to transform the paralyzing fear of uncertainty into the empowering, action-inspiring confidence of under-certainty. Here are your key takeaways:
Failure to act is the greatest shortcoming in the intelligence profession. But there’s a simple fix — concentrate on understanding what you control “well-enough-to-act” while mostly ignoring the thousands of unknowns stopping you from acting.
Defeating those few lesser-knowns empowers you to lead your team forward quickly and confidently.
Most team leaders focus on strategic and operational controllables. They interrupt innovation and growth by preventing a full inventory of unfamiliar possibilities beyond the facts they know to be true, also known as known-knowns.
Acting on innovation opportunities for growth often means surviving uncontrollables in less familiar landscapes while concentrating your limited force on the critical path forward by graphing the impact, imminence, and certainty of each actionable option.
What’s the difference between under-certainty and uncertainty?
Uncertainty
Infinite void of open-ended story problems
Prevents the Missionary from acting without limiting their scope to the finite and knowable
Typically overwhelms and paralyzes because of the limitless number of options, complexity of unfamiliar topics, and lack of confidence in leadership
Has no clear systematic or strategic hypothesis for resolution
Under-Certainty
Finite list of lesser-knowns (often just a few outstanding questions being used to justify inaction)
Empowers the Mercenary with advantages for decisive action and predictable results
Because the sheer number of elements to be handled is limited, action is less stressful for teammates and leaders
Can be defeated systematically and strategically based on simplicity, priority, or benefits to the team
Doctrine and Tradecraft
If we had a creed to live by in the intelligence profession, it might be “do something.” Taking action, getting to the next goal, and ultimately reaching some sort of victory or finish line is everything. The differentiators are the specific actions you take and how you execute them. Despite this creed, it’s common for people to fail to make decisions that result in progress.
Why does this happen?
Actionable decision-making involves three variable dimensions the average actor fails to consider:
Impact — how important the action variable is to our success
Imminence — how urgently the action variable will happen
Certainty — how sure we are of our circumstances in the landscape
These dimensions relate to both possibility and probability. Possibility lacks a measure of likelihood; it’s simply an inventory of all the things that could take place. Probability, by contrast, uses intelligence insights — what you know for sure and which questions remain unanswered — to assess how likely it is that a specific event will affect a particular outcome. Imminence connects to probability by plotting when that specific event might be likely to happen.
Let’s take the idea that aliens from Mars could come and end the human race. That’s a possibility. The probability of that possibility taking place would go up if we first confirmed there’s life on Mars. The probability would be even higher if we knew that the aliens could travel through space. It would be higher still if we knew that the aliens were hostile to humans and able to act against us.
In the same way, since the Cold War started, a nuclear holocaust has been a possibility. For 30 years, from the fall of the Soviet Union until February 2022, the probability of a nuclear exchange was low. That probability increased when Russia invaded Ukraine. One might say it grew higher still after explosions destroyed the Nord Stream pipelines that provided Germany with Russian natural gas. When Iranian-backed Hamas terrorists invaded southern Israel from Gaza in October 2023, prompting Israel’s invasion and the humanitarian protests that followed, the probability of a military confrontation grew greater still. Whether a nuclear exchange will happen is unknown, but the probability of such a war has escalated as conflicts between nuclear-armed hegemonic competitors and their allies have escalated.
Whether you’re planning your contingencies for alien invasion or nuclear war, the probability of wild scenarios, like those above, exist in a landscape you can monitor for potential impact on your plans. Using the concepts outlined above, we can plot an “action graph,”1 as shown below.
Figure 2: The three variable dimensions of the “action graph”
The use of a so-called “Probability-Impact Grid” (PIG for short) is a common tool in strategy risk assessment. We must determine which possibilities are the most probable and take steps to cope with whichever of those probabilities could have negative impacts on our plans.
Mercenaries tend to analyze probability further by splitting it into imminence and certainty, which provides a third dimension to give a higher-resolution understanding of the real uncontrollables they’ll need to cope with and survive. The likelihood of nuclear war or alien invasion is relatively low, since neither has ever happened before. Both scenarios would be truly novel, but the Mercenary might not care if it’s not happening on their watch. The impact of such events is not an infinite list paralyzing you into inaction; it’s a finite couple of questions you must defeat to produce the most desirable results.
While the impact of both scenarios above would make it difficult for your enterprise to survive at all, other forces still impact your ability to compete and win in much more certain and imminent ways. Sustaining consistent performance over time is a matter of concentrating attention on the most probable — imminent and certain — scenarios confronting your plans.
Instead of invasion, let’s focus on a more realistic scenario: inflation.
The accelerating growth of the money supply has eroded the buying power of fiat currency and elevated consumer prices to a point of unaffordability for many. The continued erosion of buying power is a much more probable scenario for you and your teammates to cope with. How inflation will affect your cost of production or pricing power, which market segments can afford your offer, or how competitors might take advantage of a cost vulnerability are all far more certain and more imminent than the invasion scenarios laid out above.
“The more often a man feels without acting, the less he’ll be able to act. And in the long run, the less he’ll be able to feel.”
— C.S. Lewis
If you don’t account for how little you might actually know, you cannot overcome biases to create the knowledge necessary to express power through action. Effectively closing this stochasm (see Chapter 2: Stochasm) — that is, the gap between what you think you know and what you actually know — brings imminent, impactful, and probable options to mind that subsequently demand action. Your inaction becomes your action if you do nothing when impact, imminence, and certainty are high. As Mark Batterson puts it, “Even choosing to do nothing is still making a choice.”2
Considering possibilities demands addressing both uncertainty and under-certainty. Uncertainty is an infinite void of questions paralyzing actors into inaction. It can be overwhelming because it’s impossible to address everything you don’t know.
Under-certainty, by contrast, is a finite list of lesser-knowns. Because those lesser-knowns are finite, it’s possible to imagine defeating them all. Once you understand your short list of under-certainties, there’s no excuse not to act.
“Action may not always bring happiness, but there is no happiness without action.”
— Benjamin Disraeli
Figure 3: Flow of Actionable Insights Supercycle
When under-certainty is defeated, insights transform into actionable choices through three major stages:
Discovery — reveals the boundaries of the macro-environment in your chosen landscapes
Optimality — selects the most advantageous options and sacrifices less optimal ones in the landscape you’re best aligned with
Simulation — imagines how other stakeholders will perceive and react to your actions, and reveals alternative options
Most leaders define intelligence topics that support, rather than challenge, their plans. This tendency leads to exclusionary thinking by ignoring anything that contradicts them. Challenging the current plan and putting a new one to the test is what intelligence is about. Markets don’t care about your plans. They care about the value of your offer. Until leaders humble themselves to this indifference, their plans will never be as sound and actionable as they could be.
In traditional intelligence task management models such as Key Intelligence Topics (KITs), “Strategic Decisions & Issues” (Optimality) comes first. You identify the factors you can control, such as the alignment of your offer with market segment preferences and whether your cost structure is sustainable. This is why we sometimes call this stage market intelligence — it’s related to market dynamics we must align with to win. We call these topics dominion control factors because they are strictly under YOUR control as the actor. You alone must figure out the definition and process of achieving success.
This winning aspiration has to be well-defined and adapted before you attempt to succeed in an unfamiliar macro-environment. As described by Lafley and Martin in their strategy book, “Playing to Win,”3 you first choose where you’re going to play before you choose how to win. Winning in one landscape is likely to be different than winning in another. The purpose of intelligence is not to support or reinforce the chosen strategy, but rather to test and strengthen it before resources are spent pursuing unproven outcomes.
We must not assume what worked elsewhere will work everywhere. Untested plans in a new landscape are called a narrative estimate because they’re educated guesses about what the future holds. The KITs protocol would find it puzzling not to begin with Optimality topics. But, what would happen if you attempted to impose your strategic decisions on an unfamiliar macro-environment?
Once you’ve defined the narrative estimate you believe will win, you can move into Discovery. Contingency control factors — or as they’ve been defined in the KITs doctrine, “Early Warning Topics” — are all things you cannot control. You simply must cope with or survive them. Changing government regulations, economic cycles, political campaigns, and demographic trends are all examples. Why begin with uncontrollables when our plans can’t change them?
Figure 4: Comparing Control Factors to Key Intelligence Topics in Supercycle phases
We begin with uncontrollables because most surprises arise from our lack of experience. Your winning aspiration will only be able to notice familiar topics and will miss potentially disastrous forces which require a recalibrated plan. It would be foolish not to adapt your plan after you understand the landscape in which it must succeed. Don’t let your naivete destroy the adaptation of your plans to a lucrative new landscape!
Optimality is logical after you’ve chosen the landscape you’re investing in. Any strategy imposed on a landscape without an understanding of the contingency control factors that must be survived would be like a navy attempting to conduct a sea battle in desert terrain. Your strategy will always be equipped to succeed in specific macro-environmental landscapes. It must be adapted to be successful in others.
Finally, if you understand the other stakeholders and their interests — and have time before action must happen — Simulation of how other stakeholders will respond can raise additional questions and scenarios unseen until contingency and dominion control factors are understood. This phase, which focuses on competitive intelligence — known in KITs doctrine as “Key Marketplace Players” — examines the dominion and contingency factors of your partners, customers, competitors, regulators, and other stakeholders who might win or lose if your winning aspiration succeeds. Simulation identifies who might stop you and how. Simulation also verifies that your assumptions are true and how you can achieve your desired result. Simulation will also reveal creative new tactics unknown until your strategy was put to the test.
KITs doctrine leaves macro-environmental forces for last in a category known as Early Warning because analysts don’t know how to respond to uncontrollables. They seem irrelevant to supporting the strategy and who might help or hinder us in executing it. But the macro-environment determines the parameters any offer must survive before an innovator has the chance to execute the strategy they’ve chosen. Furthermore, a great macro-analyst can learn to become a good strategic analyst, but the reverse is seldom true. This is due to the complexity of the landscape’s issues, stakeholders, and trends — the LIST, as we call it.
The action flow presented above should help you feel more in control. But it can make hard choices harder because it forces you to view those choices as binary, yes-no decisions. Viewing choices in this way is often a logical fallacy. In reality, you’ve inventoried only a tiny minority of the possibilities that fit your plans; you have many more than the two default options of go or no-go. Your offer — how you will bring value to a specific market segment — effectively stops the inventory of possibilities. Most strategies are frail because they seldom consider options which were unthinkable to the current plan.
Strategy must adapt to the landscape in which it must succeed.
Choosing another landscape probably means changing your plans. People seldom enjoy adapting their strategy because their inner idealist (Missionary) serves a higher calling. To change your plans would be like betraying your purpose. Because the Missionary sees strategy as existential instead of executable, most strategies are shockingly frail. The Mercenary sees things differently — a plan that might fail is not a plan at all. To paraphrase General Patton, Mercenaries understand that no plan will survive engagement with the enemy.
As you begin with this new model, it’s helpful to have a set of basic filters you can use to suppress the details in the macro-environment that aren’t relevant so you can focus only on the factors you’ll need to survive. A simple acronym for this purpose that can make the new model easier to understand here and through the remainder of this book is LIST:
L (landscape) — defining the boundaries of the macro-environment in which you must operate;
I (issues) — the obstacles, dilemmas, concerns, or problems in your landscape;
S (stakeholders) — the other actors in the landscape who might win or lose based on how one or more issues in the landscape evolves into the future; and,
T (trends) — the uncontrollable contingency control factors all actors in the landscape must survive.
Defining your landscape is the most foundational. Issues, stakeholders, and trends all progress, in that order, as derivative filters to illustrate the larger picture of the landscape. Defining your landscape is so important because it limits the scope of control factors. We will describe in more detail how this benefits your analysis through a puzzle analogy in Chapter 3: Control. But without clear boundaries, your possibilities are almost infinite. The resulting uncertainty can paralyze action.
Under-certainty becomes important because it shortens your list of options by filtering out practically everything, creating a much shorter list of obstacles you must defeat in your landscape to move forward. At the same time, it is impossible to define your landscape properly if you have unrecognized cognitive biases — things you don’t know you didn’t know (see Chapter 2: Stochasm). You’ll increase the odds of winning if you do your best to eliminate as many of your biases and knowledge gaps as you reasonably can.
Once you have landscape boundaries that define the relevant uncontrollables, you’ll start to see the issues — obstacles, dilemmas, concerns, or problems — that could have an impact on you. Issues are specific to a given landscape, but it’s common for analysts to have trouble quickly identifying controversies and contradictions indicating where the market is headed.
At Aurora, we use this simple analytic technique to explain landscape issues in a more concise way. For every issue, we ask:
What’s happening?
Why is it happening?
What might happen next?
These questions provide stakeholders with a basic structure by which they can collaboratively debate and develop effective solutions for interpreting landscape issues and their effects on possible plans.
Clearly defining issues by using these questions will allow you to identify who the most important stakeholders in the landscape are to you. Stakeholders are usually thought of as customers or competitors in a business context, but issue stakeholders also apply to non-commercial actors. They can be family, friends, members of your church, residents living in a neighborhood, or students and teachers in a school. But all stakeholders have some degree of measurable influence and interest — power and stake, respectively — that they can exercise over the issues within the landscape. Influence and interest is seldom equal and is based on their assets, abilities, and other characteristics relative to the other stakeholders.
Consider the President of the United States compared to an individual voter. Both are stakeholders in the policy and plans of the government. But the influence and interest of the President is much greater than the power and stake of the individual voter.
All stakeholders in a landscape must survive contingency control factors. These are the trends driving change in the landscape, over which stakeholders have minimal influence. One way we like to categorize contingency control factors when you’re just getting started with macro-environmental analysis is by using the STEEPLED acronym.
Social
Technological
Economic
Ecological
Political
Legal
Ethical
Demographic
Obviously, STEEPLED covers a wide range of control factors. The only way to avoid being overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of uncontrollables in the landscape is to narrow your focus to the relevant factors you can control. You have the most control over dominion and influence factors (see Chapter 3: Control). Many times with contingency control factors, the only control you have is how you respond to their impact on your plans. How to cope with or survive the impact of uncontrollables is the best you can do.
Think about launching an eczema cream for the North American market. That’s obviously within the healthcare landscape. But do you have to worry about everything in healthcare? Of course not. Your only focus is skincare. Should you start in only one state or region, rather than all three countries in the North American continent? Should you consider a formulation that would avoid regulatory scrutiny by one government or another? You get the idea. Enforcing limits on the boundaries of your landscape, issues, and stakeholders will make trends easier to cope with.
As you reorder your thinking, imagine the initial Discovery process as survival of the fittest. You must define your unique opportunity and right to win in a specific landscape first. The Optimality and Simulation phases of the Supercycle refine and test a strategy for action to achieve superiority in the eyes of your market segment.
In business, as in nature, most of the players trying to win will not succeed. Roughly 20 percent of new businesses fail during the first two years of operation, 45 percent during the first five years, and 65 percent during the first 10 years. Only 25 percent of new businesses make it to 15 years or more.4
Why are failure rates so high?
Most people have a bias for familiarity. You assume that what you’ve seen or experienced in the past will continue much the same as it has. But this is only true if you operate in the same macro-environment. When you switch to a new macro-environment, you must inventory the LIST all over again. Put another way, it’s foolish to draw conclusions in unfamiliar territory.
Unfortunately, most people don’t realize that adjacent and often similar landscapes they expand into will have a different set of issues affecting stakeholder wins and losses. The trends will also be prioritized differently as contingency control factors to be survived. Stakeholders are unfit for survival in a new macro-environment because they jump straight to strategy execution. They overlook the new LIST that will determine their success and fail to ask relevant questions as a naive stakeholder in a new landscape.
Even if you ask the right new questions, they will continue to evolve over time. In spite of a slow rate of change in your macro-environment, new control factors enter into the landscape and existing factors evolve. Power dynamics between stakeholders can shift more suddenly than one might expect as these changes occur. The pandemic-powered wave of decentralization seen in work-from-home arrangements, cloud computing, and, more recently, artificial intelligence has left many previously successful businesses ill-adapted for survival.
Applied Case Examples
Vortex Optics, headquartered today in Mount Horeb, Wisconsin, provides a case study in this type of exploration to successfully shift into faster-growing and larger markets.5 Founded in 2002, the business started out serving birdwatchers. But its billion-dollar breakthrough didn’t come from existing customers. Co-founder Dan Hamilton wondered if customers might appreciate other optics products aside from binoculars to enjoy the outdoors.
The company expanded to new product categories, such as hunting scopes. Vortex eventually attracted the attention of the military just as the Global War on Terror was ramping up post-9/11. Today, Vortex sells sophisticated optics for special operations, hunting, self-defense, and law enforcement. Vortex operates worldwide, and in 2022, the company won a contract to supply the United States Army with its new, advanced rifle targeting system at a potential value of $2.7 billion.6
Vortex didn’t start out making products that could help kill an enemy or even an animal. They didn’t have any business even trying to compete for those markets when they only sold binoculars. In fact, their original (much smaller) target market segment was people who appreciated the beauty of living things. However, when they looked at what adjacent markets needed, they were able to pivot into a new macro-environment by opening up new customer segments.
Do you think Vortex would have been a contender for a $2.7 billion United States Army contract if they had stuck to birdwatching?
The Vortex story serves as proof that the path to success has an infinite number of possibilities. You must be able to sense a bigger opportunity over the horizon to have hope of a better future. That vision must extend to serving others around you who might benefit from your innovations.
Which mindset is strongest in you?
Differentiating uncertainty from under-certainty is the key challenge that stops people from acting. But which mindset has the advantage in defeating under-certainty — the Missionary or the Mercenary?
First, let’s acknowledge a few similarities between the mindsets. Both the Missionary and Mercenary are open to possibility and have a sense of service they are called into. They’re both uncompromising and work towards their highest calling (summa vocació) or a great calling (magna vocació). Your highest calling is the work that will never be done if you don’t do it; a great calling is work that’s imposed on you by the world at large. We’ll talk more about this later in the book.
Next, let’s look at the differences. The Missionary looks at possibility through the belief that there is only one way — THE WAY. The way has constraints on it (how you treat others, what you’re willing to do or not do, etc.), which precludes a large proportion of the possibilities available because they would contradict their calling. The Missionary’s perspective on under-certainty would be that it’s impossible to know the infinite and all the possibilities that might happen as the future unfolds. They have trouble creating that narrower, finite list of lesser-knowns for action. It’s unnecessary to defeat under-certainty because they trust in a higher power and an ordered universe. They play to keep playing, which is the mindset of an infinite game. They won’t compromise their mission, but they bend their own will, emotions, and ideas to the path being revealed and directed for them.
When the Mercenary considers possibilities, there isn’t just one way. They're unencumbered by constraints directed by some higher power. They must succeed at a single assignment that produces a desired outcome for themselves and their benefactor. They understand the range of possibilities and know they won’t be rewarded unless they produce results. Producing a result depends on intentionally limiting their scope of action by defeating the few under-certainties standing in their way. Their finite mindset is only concerned with playing to win the game. They are uncompromising in producing results, but will compromise on which path they take to reach the finish line.
The mindset of the Missionary is unthinkable to the Mercenary and vice versa. But neither your Mercenary nor Missionary is a villain. They’re both heroes of your own story. They work in tandem to shape you — and, by extension, your teammates — into a more successful and higher-performing version of who you really are.
Memoirs
We can see how people around us demonstrate Missionary and Mercenary mindsets if we pay attention. Our parents provided examples that will shape us throughout life, just like your guardians hopefully did for you.
Our dad was driven by entrepreneurship. He experimented in a variety of ventures, including real estate, marketing various products, and keeping the books for the three beauty salons our mom operated in northern Wisconsin. His Mercenary demonstrated to his family that he couldn’t sit still or procrastinate about doing something to grow a business. He’d just get after it.
Derek was always the one by Dad’s side. He was eager to learn plumbing, carpentry, electrical, or whatever other skills and life lessons Dad was willing to teach. Arik, on the other hand, was never interested in learning such practical skills. He preferred to get lost in a fantasy or sci-fi novel, and he typically played the role of “flashlight holder” when compelled to help out. He discovered the subtle art of feigned incompetence and did the worst possible job holding the flashlight, only so Dad would tell him to get lost and he could get back to his books.
But our dad also revealed a strong Missionary element in the way he took responsibility for directing and shaping the faith life in our family. He was unwavering in his trust in God. There were countless times when Dad, led to share a Bible lesson, told Arik to drop whatever he was doing to read some verses. When our dad had a heart attack in 1985 and his career future grew uncertain, he redirected his energies into singing at funerals and church. He started a Bible study on Friday mornings at nearby Knapp Haven nursing home and went there every day to spend time with the elderly residents.
Our mom was experienced at rebalancing her Mercenary and Missionary mindsets thanks, in part, to Dad’s entrepreneurial instincts. Even though a lot of our dad’s ventures worked out, Mom knew a lot of them would lose money. She knew it would be up to her to support the family and cover expenses when any losses happened. She learned over her 50+ years of being in the beauty salon business how lean things could get, so she never missed a single selling opportunity. She’d even schmooze people into hiring Derek to mow their lawn for a few bucks every chance she’d get.
But our mom also saw her role in Derek’s budding lawn mowing business as being as much about helping our neighbors as it was about her son learning to work hard and make money. Mom saw hair dressing as her great calling — her primary pathway to serve. It wasn’t unusual for her to style a lady’s hair at her house if she couldn’t make it into the shop. She’d happily open the salon at 5:30 in the morning so someone could look nice before they had to go about their day. It was her mission to make people feel like a million dollars, right to the end of their lives. And she was honored to style hair for the last time at the funeral home so a lady would look nice when family and friends said their last goodbyes.
Both our parents made sure to back us up in practical ways when we needed it, financially or otherwise. But they also made sure we understood human beings have a calling greater than simply getting things done. We recognize that, for years, our dad was preparing us for the day he wouldn’t be there. He prepared our mom to endure the same loss. Their relationship was powerful to witness because they leaned on and appreciated each other’s strengths, even as they made up for one another’s limitations.
Today, as brothers, we lean on and appreciate each other in the same way, just as they showed us how to do.
In February 1995, our family built a wall.
This wasn’t just any wall. It was a wall sectioning off the 12 feet on the eastern end of our mom’s beauty salon. Derek had just gotten home from college. Our dad, in his typical get-after-it fashion, told Derek to grab a hammer and get to work. The wall created space for Arik’s new venture, Aurora Worldwide Development Corporation. Where the wall went up, we tore down one of the salon’s styling stations and rebuilt it into a wraparound desk by bolting on some aftermarket folding legs.
As the wall divided Arik’s office from the now much smaller salon, he had to figure out what Aurora would do in the world. What could he offer of value?
There were specific under-certainties to be defeated; most important was exploring the possibilities and choosing exactly what the business would specialize in. Arik knew he needed a website to attract customers. But because he had no money to hire a developer, he had to learn how to code HTML to build one. Arik’s Mercenary had to activate over and over again.
Our mom’s Mercenary instinct kicked in along the way, too. Looking out for her son when he was away trying to meet new customers, she’d keep a kind but watchful eye on any employee who might be slacking off to make sure they weren’t being lazy when the boss was on the road. Yet, Dad’s Missionary took every chance he could to mentor. He wouldn’t hesitate to share Scripture, even if it meant interrupting whatever work Arik was in the middle of doing (or learning how to do), including cold-calling new sales prospects or finishing a customer report so he could deliver an invoice.
On the surface, the wall in our mom’s salon is just one more architectural feature. But its construction pulled Derek — and all of his construction skills learned from Dad in childhood — into Aurora WDC from day one. The wall literally defined the space and path Arik would explore as an entrepreneur, but it also joined our entire family on discovering a new mission together.
Perhaps the most monumental question about the wall was where it was to be placed in the salon. There was more than one possibility for the wall’s position, but we built it on the house-accessible side of the door that led from our dad’s office into what would become Arik’s office. Had the wall been placed even three feet to the east, that door would have led into the existing beauty salon. Arik would have come and gone from an exterior-facing door to the parking lot. Building the wall where we did gave Dad the opportunity to provide Arik with an endless stream of life advice and business ideas. Most of the advice and ideas Dad gave Arik was unsolicited, but decades later, it’s treasured beyond compare.
Questions to Activate Under-Certainty
Looking at the new model presented in this chapter that puts Discovery first, consider market segments you have little or no experience with. Then attempt to use your current strategy in this new macro-environment and let us know how that turns out for you.
Infinite possibilities are overwhelming and can paralyze you into inaction. To avoid getting lost or stuck in uncertainty, we must intentionally narrow our scope to the under-certainty stopping us from forward progress. When you commit to defeating under-certainty, you’re empowered to take action in virtually any path you choose.
Ask yourself: What two or three obstacles am I dealing with that are stopping my progress? Remember, it’s not an infinite void of uncertainties in front of you — it’s a finite, conquerable list that is “certain enough” to carry you forward.
Apply that same approach to those around you, too. What are they dealing with that’s got them stuck? Remind them they have the capacity to identify and answer the questions that are essential for their progress and can ignore almost everything else overwhelming them.
The more you practice this process, the more you’ll find that defeating under-certainty can become an incredibly satisfying and anxiety-alleviating habit. You’ll figure out, too, that the tension between Mercenary and Missionary, uncertainty and under-certainty, isn’t something to eliminate. You’ll see it everywhere. Become skilled at manipulating these forces.
It’s all about finding the perfect balance between the two mindsets at the right time and in the right circumstances. One of the best exercises you can practice when you find yourself favoring one mindset is to intentionally try to act more like the other.
While your Mercenary is naturally at ease defeating a limited list of under-certainties constraining forward progress, your Missionary will be called upon in the necessary next step in Discovery. The knowledge gap between what you think you know and what is actually known makes decisions harder to execute with confidence. Closing this stochasm will require you to rebalance your mindsets and the LIST governing your attention, just like Vortex, Aurora, and every successful venture in history. You and your teammates will be well on your way to mastering this balancing act and becoming your own champions as you continue in Chapter 2: Stochasm.
Practice staring into the void, and when it stares back at you, make it blink.
Start by asking each other the right questions to envision a better future, particularly with people who see the world differently than you do. Being humble enough to admit when you’re wrong is a superpower you’ll learn to appreciate.
References:
Arik Johnson, Using Control Factors to Translate Insight Into Action (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021).
Mark Batterson, In a Pit with a Lion on a Snowy Day: How to Survive and Thrive When Opportunity Roars (New York: Multnomah, 2016).
A.G. Lafley and Roger L. Martin, Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works (Boston, Massachusetts: Harvard Review Press, 2013)
Michael Deane, “Top 6 Reasons New Businesses Fail,” Investopedia, December 30, 2022, https://www.investopedia.com/financial-edge/1010/top-6-reasons-new-businesses-fail.aspx#:~:text=Data%20from%20the%20BLS%20shows,to%2015%20years%20or%20more.
“The Surprising Success Story Of Vortex Optics,” Mount Horeb Mail, accessed November 30, 2022, https://www.mounthorebmail.com/community/surprising-success-story-vortex-optics.
“Army finally picks an optic for Next Generation Squad Weapon,” Army Times, accessed November 30, 2022, https://www.armytimes.com/news/your-army/2022/01/07/army-finally-picks-an-optic-for-next-generation-squad-weapon/.
is it tuesday yet?