Guild Pain Point #1: Uncertainty
One of the biggest catalysts and paralyzers of our time and an obstinate hurdle for making better sense of the world
Author: Sean Moffitt . Grey Swan Guild Founder and CEO, Cygnus Ventures
“Uncertainty is an intangible force with tangible consequences. operating like a magnet on our ambitions, thoughts, decisions and actions. We aspire to the notion that our Guild acts as a counterbalance to that other side of your intellect that longs for certainty. The truth is almost always somewhere in the variegated shades of grey.”
Excerpt from our guild’s book Uncertainty: Making Sense of the World for Better, Bolder Outcomes.
Grey Swan Guild’s Seven Pain Points for Making Better Sense of the World
These are the seven things that confront our mission. We obsess about them. We seek to overcome them. We seek to navigate around them. We seek to alleviate the bad consequences of them.
We are profiling our first one here, it may be the most important one currently afflicting our members and the world- it’s Uncertainty.
I. Uncertainty
Uncertainty may be one of the biggest catalysts and paralyzers of our time, and it remains so under-researched as a pain point. It can come in many different guises — flashpoints of uncertainty, creeping uncertainty, action/reaction uncertainty, revelatory uncertainty, personal uncertainty or existential uncertainty. Although tougher to understand and observe when you are in its midst, the only certain thing about uncertainty is that it’s very real.
You are not being fooled to believe uncertainty is on the rise (see The Economists’ raw tracking of uncertainty over time below) and we need better approaches to rise to its level of pervasiveness and compounding effects, for now and tomorrow.
The Guild has actually itemized the facets of uncertainty we believe better than its peers and predecessors through its lens of superCAFFEINATED. This 11-factor acronymed framework helps us dimensionalize the greater array of facets and subsets of uncertainty with five key improvements versus what’s out there:
- a) It appreciates the greater confluence of factors (11) vs. other models like VUCA or BANI (usually 4) that lead to uncertainty.
- b) It provides for the notion that we can measure and play with these factors and they are not all black, completely unpredictable, swans.
- c) It accepts that we have agency over the future and that uncertainty doesn’t just get done to us but we can affect its trajectory through our current actions.
- d) It appreciates that uncertainty is not just held in the objective capture of events in the world but also how in how it affects us differently through stress, anxiety and the queasy feeling of being unsettled.
- e) it adds factors that are not uniformly catastrophic or bad and also appreciates that wrestling uncertainty to zero in many cases is an unproductive activity.
Facets of our pain point Uncertainty:
The eleven constituent factors of superCAFFEINATED uncertainty that remain in front of us.
- Complexity — the many and different parts connected or related to each other in a complicated way, defying our understanding and confidence.
- Ambiguity — unclearness by virtue of having more than one meaning, intent or interpretation, no centrally held beliefs on the objective facts or categories.
- Faster — the accelerated pace of the everyday experience, mercurial shifts in opinion, frantic march of progress and human need to keep up.
- Fragmented — a world breaking or being broken into increasingly smaller or more separate parts or groups, that do not interact or integrate well.
- Erratic — not even or regular in pattern or movement, unlike volatility — the direction and amplitude of change is now unpredictable and unexpected.
- Integrated — connections that now allow codependent components to be fused, combined, blended, mixed, mingled, interwoven and interlaced into a whole and much more distributed system of factors.
- Needs+ — important problems with many interdependent but incomplete, in-flux or undefinable factors making things difficult to solve.
- Anxiety — the feelings of worry, nervousness, or unease associated with all these changes, interruptions and a world in chaos.
- Tech-enabled — the notion that anything is possible through the use of emerging technology, not limited by human inputs, limits or direction.
- Exponentiality — increased growth or decay over time at an ever-increasing rate, no floor or ceiling to what might be possible in the near and far future.
- Disruption — radical change to an existing system, industry or market due to innovation, bold actions, ecosystem movements and shifting landscapes.
The Guild’s Response to Uncertainty
The Guild’s answer to uncertainty is not certainty but clarity and defining what is important to know to our members and audiences.
We do this through:
- Intelligence — Content: fifty of our members got together and produced one of the best multidisciplinary books ever written on the subject, with supporting events and podcast — Uncertainty- Making Sense of the World for Better, Bolder Outcomes.
- Intelligence — Insights: we have produced a Weathervane research project of Uncertainty: Getting Upstream from Change, Disruption, Turbulence, Grey Swans & Black Swans.
- Community — we have polled our audiences and will host a future event on the best authors on uncertainty in our Uncertainty Hall of Fame.
- Ventures — we are building a venture that provides hopefully the authoritative and objective understanding and tracking of the uncertainty around us through the Real Time Uncertainty Monitor.
Read up on the other Pain Point posts
Pain Points for Making Sense of the World Overview :
https://greyswanguild.medium.com/the-pain-points-for-making-better-sense-of-the-world-bbc2b464ed2d
Grey Swan Guild — the Calls to Action
if you have an interest in responding to uncertainty, our pain point chasing and ourparticular Guild view on the world. You have a few options.
First, join our Grey Swan Guild Linkedin page Grey Swan Guild — we post daily, usually surfacing interesting observations that respond to our pain points, giving you a first view of what’s upcoming, telling you how to get involved, or recapping what cool things we have just done.
Secondly, if you want to get higher up on our radar and profile your interests, declare your intentions and potentially take on a leading or contributing role in the Guild, there is only one way to do it. Become an official member. Here’s the form.
If your enthusiasm still remains whetted, and you love going below, around and above the surface of our world’s biggest issues, become part of our standing panel of 400+ analytical and observational minds. Become a Global Sensemaker. Here’s the form.
Not satisfied with just thinking, but would rather solve these pain points too. We have designed a ventures wing to our guild called Cygnus Ventures that has embarked upon twelve different ventures to get after solutions and opportunities that tackle making better sense of the world through our well-defined pain points. Become a Cygnus Venturist. Here is the form.
Trying to find the central thread and on-ramp to participation and still have questions? Each and every month, usually in the first week of the month, we host new member onboarding Regattas, where we meet you face to face and share in why we exist, what we do, who you are, explore some interactive queries and answer every one of our queries. Join us at our next regatta in July. Here’s the link.
