By Thornton May
Futurist, Senior Advisor with GP, Executive Director & Dean - IT Leadership Academy

Our species has an unhealthy addiction to certainty. Certainty and lack of doubt are way over-rated. Let me give you a quick and admittedly superficial example. Imagine that you were coming to an event featuring a bow-tie wearing futurist as keynote speaker. Would it be preferable to not be 100%, absolutely certain what the speaker had to say, or would it be preferable, as is the case of so many sic “thought leaders” on the rubber chicken circuit, to know exactly what they are going to say? I think most people prefer a little uncertainty in their oratory. This is the launch pad for the point I want to make. I think we need a more nuanced and segmented approach to certainty. In some areas and at some moments we are quite correct in insisting on 100% certainty. In others we can be a little less precise. The trick is understanding the difference. The challenge is creating cultures that thrive in the presence of uncertainty.

What Do We Know about Our Craving for Certainty?

Archeologists will tell you that many of the earliest artifacts found at many of the earliest dig sites have a critical social function – the function of oracle. The dug-from-the-ground evidence seems to indicate that our desire to know about the future is about as old as our capacity to walk erect. This desire to know, the innate curiosity that is a vital part our humanness IS NOT a bad thing! I hypothesize however that the convoluted pathways we take to convince ourselves that we know [when in many cases we actually do not know] can be a bad and potentially dangerous thing.

Certainty became a societal “good” on the heels of the Enlightenment. As scientists [a termed coined by William Whewell, the 19th-century British philosopher] used increasingly powerful instruments to explain nature, the general public [which was increasingly literate thanks to the proliferation of newspapers] generally believed that the world had become or was well on the way to becoming knowable. The “Holy Grail” of Science was discovering universal laws -ala the law of gravity or Newton’s Third Law [“To every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.”] InUnsimple Truths: Science, Complexity and Policy [2009] Sandra Mitchell tells us that:

‘The search for universal, exceptionless laws, for example, was taken by 19th-century British philosophers . . . to be the goal of scientific investigation, as they reflected on the enormous success of Isaac Newton’s laws of motion and universal gravitation.’

Physicist Rutherford embodied this feeling when he made the remark, “In the world of science, there is physics. Everything else is just stamp-collecting.” Society had come down with a bad case of physics envy.

The Certainty of the Ages

Every age has a distinct profile of what it fears and how it feels about uncertainty. Every age institutes mechanisms for dealing with uncertainty. For example in the industrial age one new certainty [the arrival of machines in the workplace] induced two new persistent and pervasive fears: the fear of workplace accidents and the fear of unemployment. Society ultimately dealt with this uncertainty via the creation of the social invention of insurance and the welfare state.

In 1972, the Club of Rome and Dennis Meadow published The Limits to Growth. This small treatise has been represented to me as being the first time a computer model had been used to forecast possible future scenarios. The growing and vocal environmental movement took this as proof that a dystopic future was certain UNLESS we acted. Which brings us to the real crux of the matter – how do we make decisions and what do we do in the presence of uncertainty.

We will examine this question in future blogs. I welcome your thoughts and comments.