You may have wondered why so many things seem to be harder and take longer to accomplish than you would like—and why both those situations seem to be increasing.
We don’t have the answer in every case, but here is an explanation that probably covers the majority of them: The way we have been taught to solve problems was designed for a different world. To deal with uncertainty today, we need a different approach.
The old way—which still works in extremely predictable situations—is based on the assumption that the future is going to be pretty much like the past. Think demographics. You can calculate, with a high degree of confidence, the world population in 2050 because you know:
1. You know how many people are alive today: about 6.8 billion.
2. You know how those people are distributed by age, that is, you know how many teenagers there are, how many people over age sixty-five, and so on.
3. That means you know how many people are in their twenties and thirties, when most people decide to have kids.
4. And you know recent trends show people worldwide are, on the whole, deciding to have fewer kids.
Studying data like this you can, as the United Nations did recently, say with a high degree of certainty that in the year 2050, there will be 8.9 billion people on the planet. And you can also make a number of fairly accurate estimates, such as how many diapers will have to be produced, how many gallons of water those 8.9 billion people will drink each day, and how much the United States will need to pay out in Social Security benefits at the midpoint of this century.
All that is terrific. But not everything can be foreseen (and therefore predicted). Want to know if the cute guy across the hall is going to ask you out? Sorry, prediction can’t help. Is the world ready for your brand-new, never-before-seen product or service? That’s another place where prediction really does you no good.
Here’s the central point of this blog: When the future is unknowable (Is quitting your job and starting something new a good idea? Will the prototype we are developing at work find a market?)how we traditionally reason is extremely limited in predicting what will happen.
You need a different approach.
We are going to give you a proven method for navigating in an uncertain world, an approach that will complement the kind of reasoning we have all been taught. It will help you deal with high levels of uncertainty, no matter what kind of situation you face. We know it works because entrepreneurs—the people who have to deal with uncertainty every day—use it successfully all the time.
We will get into this in detail in the days ahead, but let’s foreshadow it here.
In the face of the unknown, entrepreneurs act.
Specifically they:
- Figure out what they want.
- Take a small step toward making it reality.
- Pause to think about what they learned from taking that step.
- Build that learning into their next step—and if that means adjusting from the initial path, so be it.
In other words the best way to create the future is to: Act. Learn. Build. Repeat.
