Learn to appreciate uncertainty rather than safety

This is the 7th post from my sincere dev manifesto series.

The world is more and more complex… Actually it’s always been complex. In XXth century, it was made simple artificially, and I don’t know why or how. Perhaps because people with influence agreed on a few paradigms they could all understand. Or because life was so easy we could stay away from efficiency and still feel intelligent. Anyway, as soon as newcomers learned to harvest the fruits of complexity, we all had to swim in there as well to keep up. With complexity comes uncertainty, and it’s scary.

Cognitive biases pull us towards a predictable future, a.k.a. certainty. To the extent that, like the 3 monkeys, we make the world predictable, at all cost. Until reality breaks through our idealized harness.

If only we knew. In an uncertain world, risks are higher, but so are opportunities. If we act as passive agents, it’s just more amplitude in highs and lows, and the average is the same. But we are not passive. We can sense, choose, and sort options. And thus orient highs and lows in a direction that fits us better. We can push the average further. Therefore, the higher the amplitude the quicker we can get to our goals.

uncertainty multiplies options

Our interest is to live in an uncertain world. We must learn to fight our biases to appreciate uncertainty, and adapt our practices to be more comfortable in such an environment.

In addition, when we don’t know, we learn things. It’s great. So try things and learn. “I never loose, I either win or learn” said Nelson Mandela.

I commit to promoting joy in uncertainty.

Advertisement

One comment

  1. Pingback: Sincere developer manifesto | AAAgile

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s