Managing the footprint | Business Uncertainty series
False construct #2: We gain certainty from managing what we control
It is so much easier to manage what we can control versus what we can’t. And in business, it’s incredibly useful, and operationally effective to do so – up to a point. The challenge with this approach is that it can fool us into believing that we have greater certainty over the situation we’re in, than we actually do.
Too often risk registers are over-weighted in things we can control, and under-weighted in things we can’t. At best it helps us sleep well at night. At worst, it’s a tad delusional. So when things like Covid-19 rock up and hit us, we find ourselves a lot more brittle and fragile than we had thought.
Using the same parable of the man who lost his keys from Part 1, we put a lot of energy into managing the footpath under the light (and we put an undue amount of energy into managing the risk of falling off the curbside). We don’t look to the park where he lost his keys. We have no control over it so we narrow our lens, and we assess ourselves based on how well we’re managing what we see.
What this gives us is greater managerial strength in the status quo. It builds domain dominance. But take us out of the 2x2 domain we’ve constructed and we flail. We have built no muscle strength for managing the unknown. Which is what we’re facing into right now.
And yet it’s precisely here in the unknown that our latent talents best shine. We might not be able to manage the park but we can still play there. We can extend our agency beyond any predetermined mandate. This is the power of leveraging a systems approach to disrupt the system we’re in. This is where an abundance of opportunities lie. As Nassim Nicholas Taleb says in his book, Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder “Difficulty is what wakes up the genius”.
And he goes on to say “Curiosity is antifragile, like an addiction, and is magnified by attempts to satisfy it”
We can still be curious.
As business leaders, how much organisational energy is going into managing what you can control? How much do your risk registers and governance decisions reflect what you have control over? Vs what you don’t? How much organisational energy in your business is in managing the footpath?