Are We Willing to Engage with Uncertainty?

This is an excerpt from chapter 8 of my book THE NATURAL STRATEGIST: Cultivating a Mindset of Care and Connection.

Change is more pervasive than ever before. In A More Beautiful Question, Warren Berger asks: “Will anyone follow a leader who embraces uncertainty?” (2014) The world around us continues to change, and the pace and frequency of change are increasing. The now seemingly ubiquitous change is also an invitation for us to examine our attitudes toward change and ambiguity (Small and Schmutte 2022).

Do we tolerate ambiguity? Is it something that happens to us, something that stands between us and our goals, or something we must endure? A roadblock that prevents us from reaching our goals and forces us to regain control. Or is it something we can push through and overcome? Put it behind us and return to certainty?

Or we can see ambiguity as a challenge we can choose to engage with. It can help us see a way forward. We can see it as a pivotal moment of action, a challenging fork in the road that we overcome. We feel we can rise to the challenge and overcome it through hard work. It becomes a challenge that motivates us.

Or do we embrace ambiguity as an opportunity to find new possibilities in a space where the answers are not perfectly clear? Instead of rushing to find answers, we can spend more time exploring the question. We can even begin to learn to love and live the question, as the Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke said in his letters to a poet (Popova 2016). If we remain curious and open to possibilities, we may uncover new insights and develop more original solutions.

We could cultivate a mindset where we embrace the discomfort of not knowing the answer and use it as an impetus to learn, explore multiple perspectives, and seek different ways of looking at things. By considering a range of possibilities, we can discover new insights and come up with inventive solutions. And by understanding and embracing each of these different perspectives, we can better understand the whole game, like different players on a sports team.

Could what’s around the corner be a good thing? The only way to find out is to walk around it. What we find will help us figure out what to do next, and over time, as we intelligently adapt and fine-tune, we’ll evolve our answer.

Each of these ways of experiencing and dealing with ambiguity is familiar to me. More than once I have found myself staring at an unfamiliar problem and just wanting to get it over with. Sometimes I could remember how mountain goats nimbly climb the steepest walls and move toward their goals with determination and a friendly face. It gave me comfort to take the next step.

In any given moment we have two options: to step forward into growth or to step back into safety. —Abraham Maslow

This is an excerpt from chapter 8 of The Natural Strategist: Cultivating a Mindset of Care and Connection.

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