What if we see this time as the opportunity to reclaim what we lost in a world of constant connection?
Embracing Uncertainty As An Opportunity To Leap Into Action
It’s a Thursday morning in St Albans, England. Spring sunshine brightens my kitchen, and I can hear the chirping birds in full chorus. Yet, as I am sat at the kitchen table on a Zoom meeting with my team, the tone is not so bright and chirpy — pain and confusion seem to be the prominent emotion.
Our team is entering year three of a significant change project. In the whirlwind of the past two years, there has been great excitement as obstacle after obstacle has been overcome with humor and a dedicated approach to design new solutions for age-old challenges.
I found myself sitting there feeling frustrated that all my mental models of the past were not sufficient to make sense of what had happened over the past couple of weeks.
Most of our team meetings are a mix of excitement, organised chaos, good-natured fun, and an eagerness to firm up promises for the coming week as a group of highly adaptable problem solvers go on their way.
We are frustrated, emotionally exhausted, and at a loss to see what we can deem to be essential or prioritised in a world that suddenly makes no sense.
Our home environments, seem very distant from our office that is full of colorful post-it notes and many scribbles, pictures, and snacks — all pointing towards two years of expanding our imaginations and the seemingly crazy possibilities of ‘how might we…’
None of us are quite sure what to do as the COVID-19 pandemic has rocked us to our very foundation.
And I feel I should have answers.
The truth is.
I have none.
This is the phase of Design Thinking that gets talked about least: synthesis. It is where we shift from the openness of “beginner’s mind” to trying to make sense of it all.
The next step is usually to start recognising patterns and identifying themes and discover meaning in all the information that you have observed. This is the time when things in front of us feel most unclear and unsettled, where the pressure to make new meaning from our current learnings rest heavily on our minds.
These feelings are hard enough to manage in a period of status quo, let alone in the middle of a Global Pandemic when we struggle to make micro and macro levels such as:
Should we wear pajama bottoms during a business meeting on Zoom?
Is it necessary to go for groceries?
Do we need to go back to a job that takes up fourteen hours of my day and gives us a reduced quality of life?
The world has shifted and most of us find it hard to make sense of this disruption as daily life becomes a mixture of human decisions, unforeseen events and utilising technologies.
Think Like A Traveler
All too often, we live life on cruise control with no obvious connections to the things and people around us, and miss opportunities to see life through fresh eyes.
The upside of disruption is we can begin to put the pieces together in new and insightful ways and discover new fresh mental models.
New imagination can emerge that results in a system, product, service, or experience that rethinks the world towards a new and better reality.
When we visit a foreign country and observe the environment around us, we are forced to admit we don’t know everything. And become our own versions of Sherlock Holmes, continually trying to figure out all that its different from the things we find familiar.
While Designing for change in times of significant disruption, it’s not enough to group our observations into obvious themes. This is especially true when the behaviours of the global population have shifted to being advised to stay in their own homes.
There are few things as challenging to me than seeing people I care about struggle.
And it feels more natural to offer a fast answer or a framework from previous experience to reduce anxiety.
By acknowledging, there is no single, right perspective, since all perspectives are developed from our specific situation. I’ve discovered that my quick conclusions never get the teams I work alongside to create unique ideas, and it certainly does not help them develop their creative muscles.
In these circumstances, I remember what my best tutors have done to help me through this arduous step: accept how hard this distinct part of the work is, ask them great questions, and show them my belief that they will find their way through.
In other words, I adopt the posture of being Curious.
Curiosity can teach us how to learn
I struggled with getting good grades in high school in classes that didn’t enable me to participate and learn according to my strengths.
When teaching about change management, I describe how learning can happen in many ways, including; when one sits in a Maths lecture, and one goes for a walk on a beach. Learning happens in both these contexts— though in very different ways and with varying outcomes.
One of my favourite psychologists is Jean Piaget, who, back in the 1950s, observed children to understand how people learn.
He stated that, counter to popular belief, knowledge doesn’t exist in the world, and you don’t acquire it: Knowledge exists in our minds, through our active construction. No one teaches you anything. Instead, he claimed that we are natural learners, continually processing the world to create our understanding.
A simplified example of this Piaget’s theory of the learning process is how a Child development stage dictates how they might understand the board game Monopoly
- Ages 0–2
The Child puts the hotels and dice in their mouths.
- Ages 2–7
The Child plays Monopoly and makes up their own rules.
- Ages 7–11
The Child understands basic rules and not so much the idea of the transactions involved in mortgages, loans, etc.
- Ages 11 and Up
Complex and hypothetical transactions unique to each game are now possible.
Hence, If you put together a group of children from the different age ranges, all of their reactions to the same game of Monopoly would be, at best, uncertain.
Uncertainty happens when you begin to see things in the world that don’t make sense to you. The things you thought you knew — the things that helped you feel stable and clear — are now in question.
And my goodness. This current state for us all is hard. While we all crave certainty in varying degrees — it is safe to say that at the time of writing, we are experiencing a mixture of hope and fear that is unnerving for everyone.
Hope and fear are something experienced by all of us and is embedded in the structure of our brain. The ‘flight or fight’ response has evolved in our frontal cortex. Recent studies indicate that directing our thoughts towards the positive — hope — results in our frontal cortex communicating with subcortical regions deep in our brains. Hence, the human tendency to embrace a posture of creativity that is grounded in hope has led to the survival of our species is a consequence of our evolution.
In their book, Creative Confidence, Tom and David Kelley from IDEO underline the importance of us learning to be comfortable with uncertainty and instead of being paralysed by the prospect of failure. In essence, we should embrace uncertainty as an opportunity to be able to leap into action.
A time of uncertainty can be a learning moment if we decide to tolerate ambiguity even when we are not sure if we are on the right path.
Don’t Look Down
Psychologist Robert Sternberg, who has done lots of research on intelligence, wisdom, creativity, and leadership tells us that all the creative people he has studied had one thing in common, in that when they when deciding to be creative, they tended to:
— Redefine problems in new ways to seek out solutions
— Take sensible risks and accept failure as part of the creative process.
— Confront the obstacles that arise from challenging the status quo.
— Tolerate uncertainty.
— Develop a thirst to keep adding to their skill set, rather than letting their knowledge stagnate.
Sternberg adds:
“deciding to be creative does not guarantee that creativity will emerge, but without the decision, it certainly will not”.
To bring yourself back to a calm state of knowing, you have to generate a new “eureka ” moment inside your mind that reframes your old information with the new information. A mental model that, through the force of your imagination and intelligence, connects those dissonant dots into new meaning.
Learning isn’t about the consumption of new information. Learning is the process of using our innate abilities to construct — or create — new understandings of the world.
Learning, by its very nature, is a creative act.
We are living in a paradox of equal measures of anxiety and excitement for the unlimited opportunities that currently exist for ordinary folks who love to design to disrupt the world with human-centered approaches to micro and macro problems- and for the pain and suffering of millions of people across the globe.
There is a belief out there that designers of change are always optimistic and confident, but that has never been my experience. Creativity isn’t always enjoyable. One will experience a range of emotions that acknowledge a profound vulnerability necessary to develop creative solutions.
The most important thing any leader, teacher, or manager can make explicit is that you understand being creative is hard work, that we are in an unprecedented time of uncertainty, and there will be many dead-ends ahead.
Lastly, in this time when people are connected emotionally more than ever before. Harnessing the power of empathy will be a vital tool to help leaders navigate this uncertainty and turbulence by merely saying to folks who matter most to you:
“I know you know I know this is hard, and I care”.
