And now, even more uncertainty: Reframing uncertainty as a growth mindset
When we entered 2024, uncertainty was at the top of every leadership agenda. Election uncertainty, regulatory uncertainty, AI uncertainty, geopolitical uncertainty. The list of trends with consequential unknowns is long and growing. And over the past few weeks, organizations based in or connected to the USA got another jolt of uncertainty as the 2024 Presidential elections shifted in course once more.
And yes, these trends affect strategy, to the extent they will have an impact on your industry and are critical to your strategic choices. But I’m seeing leaders fall into the same trap: framing uncertainty as negative.
We are asking each other how we can manage, overcome, get through (or my favorite, wait it out), this uncertainty.
As organizational leaders, figuring out what you are trying to achieve, and then setting the organization up for success in an uncertain environment is the core of your job. How to do so is the focus of Survive Reset Thrive. But viewing uncertainty as universally negative does not prepare your businesses for growth. So to lead a growth journey, your first needed step is to reframe how we view it.
Uncertainty is normal. Certainty is a delusion. Let’s’ remind ourselves of the definition: Uncertainty is a series of future events which may or may not occur. Whether or not these events are good or bad depends on what we are trying to achieve and how we are set up.
Uncertainty is not new, and we have been making strategic decisions facing uncertainty since we invented the word strategy, but I am sensing something about the current environment that is causing more paralysis than before. So how can we reframe and embrace it better? We need to unlock our growth mindset, and here’s a few reminders of how to do so:
Reframe, reframe, and reframe again: Watch your language around uncertainty, and correct team members when they put a negative view on it – it happens more than you think! Mindset is critical, and growth mindsets are hard when we are in protect mode.
Stop asking ‘what could happen?’ and instead ask ‘what could make us (kickers)?’ and ‘what could break us (killers)?’: Shifting from predicting problems to exploring how to optimize low tail opportunities (and risks) pulls on a different part of our brains, and the ideation around kickers usually gets to several priorities that we should be doing anyway.
Distinguish between types of decisions: Not all decisions need new information before acting; remember to isolate – and exploit - your no regret moves. Definition, those which even if we got our beliefs wrong, we would not regret making.
I explored these topics, and many more, including how AI impacts this (which we’ll cover in next months’ newsletter) during many recent podcasts.
