155: What's your uncertainty budget?

Why does the same uncertainty make one team lean in and another freeze?

We think it comes down to budget. Every organisation can only absorb so much uncertainty before it stops feeling like opportunity and starts feeling like a threat. And over the past couple of years, a lot of that budget has been gobbled up by stuff that nobody actively chose.

Prompted by an email from Brian, one of our research interviewees, we unpack the idea of uncertainty budgets. Recorded with one eye on the baby monitor and then with the baby on a lap (transfixed by our microphone's big furry hat).

• The tipping point where uncertainty flips from anxiety into curiosity, and why chopping uncertainty into chunks can help
• The uncertainty tax: where your budget has gone these last couple of years, and why copying everyone else’s AI strategy is the corporate version of hiding in the herd
• The experiment that made millions and got the programme shut down – and where the org's uncertainty budget was really going
• Why good management and good innovation are quietly at war in every organisation
• The one thing leaders say about ambiguity that makes everything worse
• How a leader can "take out a loan" on uncertainty, and what they have to put up as collateral

For anyone who’s been told to “get comfortable with ambiguity” and suspected that was missing the point.

Got a better word than “bubble”? Or a story about where your uncertainty budget went? tentacles@crownandreach.com

One correction: IBM didn’t make loom kit. Its punch cards came via Herman Hollerith’s census tabulators, which borrowed the idea from the Jacquard loom. It's the same point we were making but one step further back in time.

References

• Brian – research interviewee who prompted the episode
• Pitch Provocations – our method, which we're currently running on ourselves
• Multiverse Mapping – our method that can slice anxiety-inducing uncertainty into budget-friendly chunks
• Uncertainty budget
• Uncertainty tax versus deliberate investment
• Uncertainty Bubble / Uncertainty Membrane
• Risk appetite, risk tolerance and risk capacity
• The distinction between risk and uncertainty
• Cranfield School of Management (where we presented our experiment)
• Clayton Christensen's The Innovator’s Dilemma
• [Unmentioned, but Frank Knight’s Risk, Uncertainty and Profit is the classic source for the risk/uncertainty distinction]
• Episode 103, “Competence, control and consequences”, tells the experimentation-shutdown story in full.

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