The Upside of Uncertainty by Nathan Furr

Author:Nathan Furr
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press
Published: 2022-07-19T00:00:00+00:00

Reflection and Practice

Learning in fog requires adopting fast learning cycles, developing simple rules, and changing your learning strategy as the situation demands. Here’s how you can get started.

Create your own accelerator. What would it be like to create your own accelerator experience, such as by forcing yourself to talk to as many people as possible, as quickly as possible, about your idea? When Robin Chase was searching for the right way to describe Zipcar, the vehicle-sharing startup she cofounded, she wrote ideas down on index cards and tested them with everyone she met. She soon discovered the secret to convincing people to try the service was in the words she used to describe it: wheels when you want them!12

Develop simple rules—fast and frugal heuristics—based on your past experience. You can have simple rules for almost any area of life. Create or adjust simple rules based on what you want to do. Thoughtfully develop your own rules but keep them flexible. They can also turn out to be uncertainty balancers, as they free up mental energy. For example, a benevolent humanitarian’s simple rule might be to give fifteen minutes to everyone asking for it, or a shrewd art collector’s simple rule might be to follow head, heart, and price tag. Here are a few examples of simple rules to get your imagination started. For staffing: hire slow, fire fast. For eating: have desserts on weekends but not weekdays. For your budget: make coffee at home instead of buying a cup every day. For your social life: spend time with people who make you feel alive. For vacations: visit new places balanced with returning to old favorites. For your relationship with your partner: always (or never, depending on what works for you) resolve a disagreement before bed.

Most importantly, adopt the rules that work for you. In one of the more hilarious illustrations, when Gertrude Stein—novelist and mentor to Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henri Matisse, and others—discovered her beloved dog, Basket, had passed away, a friend suggested getting a dog of the exact same breed and calling it Basket. Pablo Picasso took the opposite view, arguing that getting the same dog would only remind them of the one they’d lost. Two conflicting simple rules. What did Stein do? For a while she tried to combine them, to “have the same and not to have the same.” But in the end Stein decided she wanted the same dog, and she did call him Basket. “I cannot say that the confusion between the old and the new has yet taken place,” she said.13

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