The Case for Uncertainty (and How to Navigate It)
Four questions for navigating the unknown—without trying to resolve it.
I wrote my first blog under the name "bonhoefferchk." I used that same name on OkCupid, which is where I met
. What can I say? I'm a prodigy when it comes to making small choices that throw up massive barriers to entry into my life.Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a German pastor and theologian. I first encountered his work in a course on contemporary Christian theology. All of the theologians we studied in that course had a huge impact on me as both a Christian and a thinker, but Bonhoeffer stood out to me.
Bonhoeffer's early work is fairly conventional. You might very well find his book, The Cost of Discipleship, on the shelves at any mainline or even moderately conservative church. But his final work, unfinished and published posthumously, is radical. It's radicalizing.
Bonhoeffer's final work is a series of letters, essays, and outlines sent to his friends, family, and fiancée while he was locked away in Tegel Prison.
Oh. Yeah. I should probably mention that he was in prison.
Why? Because he was part of a resistance group in Nazi Germany and conspired with the group to assassinate Hitler.
Bonhoeffer was a balding, nerdy, wire-rimmed-glasses-wearing badass.
At least, that was my take on him when I was 20 years old. Who am I kidding? It’s still my take on him.
Keep reading or listen on the What Works podcast.
Bonhoeffer spent a year and a half inside Tegel Prison.
He had plenty of time to reflect on the current state of affairs in Germany and the Christian church at large. He was not impressed.
Recognizing the steady march of secularism, Bonhoeffer saw the church as an institution and Christianity as a religion as largely losing its relevance in the world. Observing this, however, he didn't give in to the reactionary impulse. He didn't condemn people for falling away from God or call for a return to a more religious society. Nor did Bonhoeffer try to preserve some mystical nook for God in a society in which scientific breakthroughs were making the "unknown" a smaller and smaller place for God to hideout.
"What is bothering me incessantly," he wrote to his best friend Eberhard Benge in April 1944, "is the question [of] what Christianity really is, or indeed who Christ really is, for us today." Bonhoeffer observed that God had become a "stopgap" in modern society.
God was found in the margins—the margins of knowledge, of experience, of devotion—instead of at the center of life. God was relegated to filling in the gaps between what we knew of the world.
Instead of pushing science or even secularism away, the question that Bonhoeffer considered incessantly was the question of how to understand God in the midst of modernity. In the midst of advances in science and technology. In the midst of resistance to oppression—oppression often carried out in the name of God.
This is the question that's bothered me incessantly for 20 years now, too. What does it mean to center God within the known, material world? What does it mean to put Jesus "in the midst of life" rather than at its boundaries? Bonhoeffer was trying to imagine the nearly unimaginable: religionless Christianity. And so I've spent the last two decades trying to imagine that, too.
Okay, what does any of this have to do with work? Quite a lot, actually.
Bonhoeffer’s “stopgap God” is everywhere today. We rarely call it God, of course. If we’re contemplating something that leans toward the beyond, we might call it the Universe or purpose. But we rely on stopgaps for more mundane things, as well.
Certainty is intoxicating.
In its absence, we fill in the gaps with whatever ideas provide the next fix. Blueprints, formulas, metrics, data analysis—we simplify, searching for the security of assurance. Rather than facing down uncertainty, we scramble to form information into the image of our anxiety. We fill in the gaps with new data, new reports, new expertise.
We expect that the more knowledge we can gather up, the more likely we are to reach certainty. To know how things work. To solve the problem. "But the problem with problem-solving," writes Nora Bateson, "is the idea that a solution is an endpoint. There are no endpoints in complex systems, only tendrils that diffuse and reorganize situations…"
The problem with the stopgap God—or the stopgap Marketing Strategy or the stopgap Revenue Stream, for that matter—is that it offers a solution, an endpoint. God is on the other end of whatever existential mystery you're contemplating. God is the solution. The Marketing Strategy is on the other end of your lead generation problem. The Marketing Strategy is the solution. The Revenue Stream is on the other end of your income shortfall. The Revenue Stream is the solution.
Or, as systems theorist Donella Meadows observed, the stopgap solution seems to be the key—but to believe so is a mistake. "Here, in systems analysis, in interconnection and complication, in the power of the computer," she writes, "here at last, is the key to prediction and control. This mistake is likely because the mindset of the industrial world assumes that there is a key to prediction and control."
Inevitably, the situation changes. Does the stopgap still fit in the hole that's left? Rarely. When Bonhoeffer noticed that God no longer fit in the tiny hole left for divine mystery, he let God fill up everything that wasn't the hole. God became "beyond in our midst." He gave God the chance to be so much bigger simply by letting go of what he thought he knew about God. He asked a different question about God and found a bigger, stranger, and more compelling answer.
If there is one thing we can know for sure, it's that the situation will change.
What works is always a moving target.
Even the "what" and the "works" are their own variables. When I think about what needs to be done this week, this month, or this year, the options are pretty obvious. What's less obvious are the overlapping contexts and forces within which those options exist.
Just as Bonhoeffer's breakthrough happened when he stopped trying to squeeze God into the ever-shrinking hole in human knowledge, there's a breakthrough to be had when we stop trying to squeeze certainty out of uncertainty. The goal of learning, analysis, and strategy doesn't have to be a sure bet.
We don't have to resolve uncertainty. We can't.
Not only is the market changing at a breakneck pace, but all of the creative and innovative work we do creates a mess of unknowns. We're not so much finding solutions or even fixing problems as we are adapting in real time. Yet, many of us perceive that constant adaptation as aberrant. We believe that some sort of homeostasis is the "normal" course of things.
We wait for things to get back to normal. Or we assume that by making the right moves, we can achieve a more comfortable state of equilibrium. Certainty is just beyond our grasp.
But it's that longing—not uncertainty—that creates our anxiety. If we let uncertainty be normal, we might alleviate the uneasiness that comes from trying to get back to a state that never was.
Since uncertainty is normal, we need ways to plot a course in the midst of it. "We can’t control systems or figure them out," writes Meadows, "But we can dance with them!"
So, how might we navigate uncertainty without trying to resolve it?
1. What's changed?
We can accept that uncertainty is the usual state of things and acknowledge that there are particular clouds of uncertainty that appear more destabilizing or urgent than others. Why do these clouds exist?
We're constantly dreaming up, designing, and producing new "things." With every new process or strategy, we generate new variables. "Hence, companies as well as workers," observes organizational researcher Peter Brödner, "have to permanently cope with new situations, surprise, and uncertainty." I love this insight. It's easy to assume that the cause of uncertainty is external forces outside our control (and that can certainly be the case), but Brödner reminds us that we make the uncertainty we live with, too.
Every new article I write, offer I make, or connection I forge introduces the potential for surprise. It's not just happening to me. I produce uncertainty every damn day.
When there's a particular cloud of uncertainty hanging over our heads, I think the first question we need to ask is: What's changed?
Simply laying out the actions we've taken and the decisions we've made, as well as the external factors that contribute to the cloud of uncertainty, helps us get a feel for the contours of the current situation.
2. What are the knowns and unknowns?
Every cloud of uncertainty is made up of variables. These variables interact in various ways. Some variables are "known," and others are "unknown."
Alright, I'm going to attempt basic algebra to demonstrate.
Imagine the equation a = b + c. This equation defines the relationship between three variables: a, b, and c. First, a is related to c in that a - b = c. Also, b is related to c in that a - c = b. While we can continue to tease out the relationships in the formula, we can't know more about these relationships until we identify a "known" variable.
If I say that a = 5, then I know that b and c could be 2 and 3. Or, b and c could be 1 and 4. Or b and c could be 0 and 5. You get the idea. I still don't know for sure what b and c are, but I've narrowed the options (as long as we're sticking to integers...). If I have two known variables, then there is only one possible answer for the third variable. If a = 5 and b = 1, then c must be 4.
Okay, enough of that.
What I'm trying to say here is that knowing something about a cloud of uncertainty actually helps us quite a bit. Many of us get swamped trying to know everything before we make a choice or take action. Or, we avoid unknown variables altogether.
But when we consider both what we know and what we don't, we get a much better look at what's happening inside our cloud of uncertainty. In fact, letting unknowns exist allows us to consider options we might not have considered before.
When both b and c are unknown, there are 6 different combinations of integers that could solve the problem. Each one is just as valid as the next. The same is true for whatever is happening inside our own clouds of uncertainty. What an opportunity!
3. What forces are at play?
Letting things go unknown—that is, unmeasured and unquantified—is a critical part of navigating uncertainty. I find that when there's no label or data point that I can use to sum up a complex phenomenon, it's best to think in terms of force.
And to think in terms of force, we're going to have to extend our little algebra problem into the realm of physics.
Fair warning: I never took a physics class. I was much too busy convincing my high school band director to let me do AP Music Theory as an independent study.
But thanks to the power of the internet, I can tell you that “a force is a push or pull upon an object resulting from the object’s interaction with another object.” And it's that push and pull that I'm thinking of when I say force.
So, let's go back to that algebra problem again: a = b + c. If we say that a = 5 and b tends to be an even number, then what can we say about c? We can think of “tends to be an even number” as a force pulling us in the direction of a certain set of solutions. Now, instead of 6 equally plausible solutions, it's more likely that b = 0, 2, or 4, which means it's more likely that c = 5, 3, or 1.
In the actual context of your particular cloud of uncertainty, you can think of how the push and pull of trends, economic conditions, budgets, stress levels, holidays, family needs, etc., tend to make certain scenarios more likely than other scenarios.
We encounter the push and pull of a dizzying array of forces in everything we do. For instance, when I publish this essay, I have no idea how it will "perform." When I finally hit "send," my essay's relative success will depend on the volume of emails hitting subscribers' inboxes, the relevance of the subject of the essay, the urgency of other concerns, the popularity of someone else's essay that day, etc.
I can't attribute the success (or lack thereof) of this essay to any one of those forces. What results is the product of this essay's interaction with 9000 inboxes managed by 9000 people all over the world. There's no way to quantify or measure the forces at play. But I can consider how the pushes and pulls might change the results.
For whatever might be inside our cloud of uncertainty, we examine the forces at play. We don't actually need to know anything to do this. We don't have to wait until we know the magnitude of the force or even what direction it might be pushing or pulling in. Naming them helps to acknowledge the uncertainty and naturalize the complexity of a given situation.
Of course, it's helpful to get a feel for how a force is likely to act. But we can't do that until we get good at naming what the forces are in the first place.
4. What is my hypothesis?
In a letter dated June 4, 1944, Bonhoeffer wrote to his friend that the concept of God had become a "working hypothesis" to explain what couldn't be explained. "It is becoming evident that everything gets along without 'God'—and, in fact, just as well as before," he observes. When the question of God is asked narrowly, the answer of 'God' is just a stand-in for some unknown variable that will eventually be knowable. God, he says, is "losing more and more ground."
Constructing a hypothesis is another aspect of navigating uncertainty. But a hypothesis cannot be a pat answer to a narrowly conceived question, as Bonhoeffer observed God to be in modern society. The question (or problem or mess) is always broader, deeper, and more complex than we initially think.
And so, our hypothesis doesn't describe a solution. It's not an answer. It's how we describe the relationships between variables.
It's like the algebra problem we were working on earlier (a = b + c). That formula describes the relationships between three variables (a, b, and c). Having a formula to start with is great! It makes everything easier. When I tell you that a = b + c is true, you have the starting point of a solution. But rarely do we get a formula we know is true.
Much more often than not, we have to make a formula and then see if it's helpful. That's a hypothesis.
God as a "working hypothesis" is really just a formula—not a hypothesis at all. I might express it this way: Knowledge of the World = Scientific Knowledge + God. The way Bonhoeffer saw it, Scientific Knowledge was an ever-increasing variable, and there was a negative correlation between Scientific Knowledge and God. That is, the higher the value of Scientific Knowledge, the lower the value of God. Bonhoeffer argued that the value of Scientific Knowledge had gotten so high that the value of God was effectively zero.
Bonhoeffer needed a different formula. So he set about trying to make a hypothesis he could prove—or at least demonstrate the usefulness of. In early August 1944, Bonhoeffer came up with this hypothesis:
If "Jesus is there only for others,"
and "faith is participation in this being of Jesus..."
Then, "our relation to God is a new life in 'existence for others'..."
Maybe G = J x p? Okay, that's probably a bit too try-hard for even this try-hard analogy. And I have no idea what it would mean to divide God by Jesus... or participation... But hopefully, you get the idea.
My point is that navigating uncertainty requires crafting formulas—hypotheses—and testing them. The first time we state a hypothesis, we can assume it's, at best, not quite right. Over time, we can improve on that hypothesis or make a new one.
And that's the real work of navigating uncertainty.
In a letter dated August 11, 1944, Bonhoeffer wrote his final hypothesis to his dear friend Eberhard:
In the long run, human relationships are the most important thing in life...
I don't think Bonhoeffer resolved the uncertainty he felt about the "this-worldliness" of God. But I think he reached a hypothesis that could act as a map for navigating the uncertainty.
On April 4, 1944, Hitler gave the order to round up the surviving members of the group that attempted his assassination. Bonhoeffer was transported from Tegel Prison to the concentration camp at Flossenbürg. On April 8, he was sentenced to death. On April 9, he was hanged. He was just 39 years old.
Two weeks later, American troops liberated the camp.
I want to close with another hypothesis published almost 60 years later. In his book On Religion, philosopher and theologian John Caputo considers, like Bonhoeffer before him, religion without religion. Specifically, he's interested in the "love of God."
"What do I love when I love my God?" he asks.
Caputo concludes simply that if God is love, then I love love when I love my God. He complicates this beautifully in the conclusion, saying that "love is a how, not a what. And so is God." By this, he means that God isn't something to be known but rather an action to take, a journey to embark on. "The meaning of God is enacted," writes Caputo, "or else it is refused and we devote our time instead to building up our stock portfolios." Continuing:
The meaning of God is enacted in an openness to a future that I can neither master nor see coming, in an exposure to possibilities that are impossible for me, which surpass my powers, which overpower me, which drive me to the limits of the possible, which draw me out to God.
There is far more meaning to be had in navigating uncertainty than trying to resolve it. No stopgap needed.