Navigating Chaos. Jeff Boss
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that ultimately upend the foundation and render it incompetent, unserviceable, and/or irrecoverable.
And there are gaps everywhere in life and in organizations—communication gaps, personal meaning and fulfillment gaps, character gaps, leadership gaps. The list goes on.
You name it, and at some point there is a gap that exists at any one of the physical, mental, emotional, or social levels that drive individual and organizational performance. Why? Because shit happens. Uncertainty unfolds.
What you relied upon to get “here” no longer works, and so you must find a new way to get “there.” But, the trouble is, “there” is uncertain because it’s new, so getting to a new destination requires not only the skill and will to adapt to change, but also the awareness of the need to do so.
The impetus for change, whether it be personal, professional, or organizational, is not always obvious. Filling the organizational gap requires a keen understanding of not only one’s particular organizational silo or specialty but also a broad contextual awareness about yourself, how your individual skill set fits across the company’s, what you want out of work, and how your skills and expertise support the company’s mission and values.
In my special operations experience, anything and everything that we faced was situated amongst a global network of uncertainty, one that continually morphed based on the interdependency that comprised geographically dispersed terrorist cells and the rate of technological change they adopted. The faster the enemy learned our targeting methods and techniques, the faster we needed to think and act to stay ahead of the curve. What allowed us to do that was—among other things—having a clear purpose.
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The circumstances that people and businesses face today in terms of growth, change, and interdependence cannot be solved with the same line of thinking that got them there. There must be something new. Something revolutionary that puts your brand, your product ahead of the rest. If your business operates using the same model it has for the past five, ten, or twenty years, then it’s already obsolete because the very definition of growth entails change.
The change that individuals and organizations face today is never black and white and never gives way to simple solutions. To remedy chaotic situations requires a chaotic approach, one that is nonlinear, constantly morphing, and continually sharpening its competitive edge with recurring feedback loops that build upon past experiences and lessons learned. Improvement cannot be sustained without reflection.
Chaos arises from myriad sources that stem from two origins: internal chaos rising within you, and external chaos being imposed upon you by the environment. The result of this push/pull effect is the disequilibrium that you feel in your heart, mind, body, and soul, and which manifests itself as confusion, anxiety, lack of fulfillment, or despair.
At the individual level, chaos stems from both the known and the unknown—the awareness of a particular end-state; the fear, doubt, trepidation, or lack of experience we have in a particular arena; or from the personal change we experience either as a result of learning something new or an unwanted force that’s pushed upon us from the outside. Managing the chaos imposed by these influences is what separates winners from losers. Why? Because the uncertainty that you face as a human being proliferates into every corner of your life, such that your personal chaos gives rise to challenges in your profession, and the chaos of the workday compounds the tension felt in your personal life. Without the ability or knowledge of how to manage himself physically, mentally, emotionally, or spiritually, you fall prey to depression, despair, and general shittiness.
Types of Unknowns
There are two types of unknown factors that can spiral into chaos, what I call the “Fudge Factor” and the “Oh, Shit! Factor.” The Fudge Factor refers to known unknowns, or things that you know exist but can’t quite quantify. For example, you may leave work Monday between 5:00 and 5:30 p.m. because you know the longer you wait, the more traffic will build up. You know traffic exists but you’re not sure how much, so you build in a Fudge Factor of time that’s high enough to compensate for what you believe will be a worthy delay. You can estimate the delay because you know it’s there, but you don’t know how much or for how long.
The Oh, Shit! Factor is just the opposite: unknown unknowns that arise out of nowhere (i.e. the external environment) that always seem to bite you in the ass at the most inopportune time, and these are the little “pleasantries” that Murphy (of Murphy’s Law infamy) likes to throw at us. Planning on going to work early but your car doesn’t start? Oh, shit! Bought a ridiculously overpriced house because of a promised year-end bonus that never materialized? Oh, shit! In a firefight and your weapon jams? Oh, shit! You get the idea.
Whether it’s the military, business, or a competitive event, every single mission, deal, or play has the possibility of failure—for uncertainties of either the Fudge or Oh, Shit! variety to occur. The question is, how do you deal with such uncertainty?
During my tenure on the SEAL Teams, every enemy situation we encountered necessitated a slightly different approach, a tweak here and a new technique there. No two targets were ever the same, and each one had its own personality, its own outcome, and its own plan for how we attacked and ultimately executed it. We could never ascertain with 100 percent certainty what the enemy’s intentions were or how they would respond, simply because there were just too many variables to consider.
And you know what? Business is no different.
The Paradox of Uncertainty
Uncertainty may appear boundless—limitless—but the very absence of certainty affords an equal opportunity to create it.
Random life tests like to spring up out of nowhere at the most inopportune times—led by that guy Murphy and his damn law—as a means to test us and challenge our physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual fitness as we attempt to confront these challenges head on. Possessing a balance of physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual fortitude is what allows us to endure amidst ambiguity, tackle any challenge, and say, “I got this.” The challenge, of course, is that not everybody knows how to maximize his or her potential.
I have been fortunate in my life to have seen and experienced levels of performance that some people can only dream about, human achievements that bear no scientific explanation and no quantifiable evidence to explain how. And it all occurred under uncertain conditions.
If you consider the phenomena of certainty and uncertainty you can see an inextricably linked marvel: the fact that one cannot exist without the other. In other words, the very lack of certainty yields a one-way path toward certainty for the simple fact that nothing can be more uncertain than it already is. I know, this is deep, but hear me out.
Look at it this way: remember all those “F’s” you received on your research papers in school? (Maybe that was just me.) Getting a big red “F” at the top of a research paper says it all (i.e. “you suck”) as there was no “F” minus because you couldn’t really do any worse than you already did. “Bad” is bad, “suck” is suck, there is no “badder” and you can’t suck any more than you already do. The same principle applies to uncertainty. From uncertainty one doesn’t become any more uncertain. It’s like hitting rock bottom—and from rock bottom, the only place left to go is up.
So, what exists with both certainty and uncertainty is an interdependent system; a world, situation, or whatever you want to call it that only occurs based on the evolution and existence of the other.
No matter what system you employ to defeat the other, there are certain principles that govern certitude in human nature. For instance, you can’t have trust without honesty. Likewise, there can be no learning without humility, no selflessness without service, no innovation without disruption, no leadership without followership, and no fitness without “fatness” (kidding, but you get my point). What I’m trying to say is that each element depends on its reciprocal for two things:
1 Its existence
2 Its solution
The dichotomy that uncertainty presents, then, is both a serendipitous and deliberate opportunity to