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The Tension Between Certainty and Growth
“The universe is not a world of separate things and events, of external spectators and an impersonal spectacle. It is an integral whole.”[i]-Erwin Laszlo
As a child of maybe 7–8 years old, I would visit my uncle’s farm in Saskatchewan. The greatest thrill was when he put me behind the wheel of his car sitting on a pillow so I could just barely see over the steering wheel, and then he let me drive the car hands-free down the driveway! Magically, the wheels of the car steered themselves. Now and again the car might veer slightly left or right, but it seemed to know exactly where it was going without anyone guiding it.
Decision-making in organizations operates in ruts in much the same way. In Decision Making for Dummies I shared the story of a consultant who told me that within 15 minutes of walking into a company, he knew what they’d do next. Decision-making ruts create predictable patterns. They also block growth.
Our brain likes certainty too. Its job is to keep us safe. When everything is routine, there’s no need for anxiety, panic, or fear.
Falling into a hypnotic state is the result. Stability drifts into complacent stagnation.
Uncertainty, novelty, and the unfamiliar snap us out of the rut of routine to pay attention to what is going on. Something larger is at work that helps explain why the nature of the changes we are experiencing has a different tenor to them. Years later when I was old enough to look beyond my experience peering over the steering wheel of a farm truck with a mind of its own, I noticed that the roads had permanent mud-made trenches in them. The car’s wheels were locked into the ruts.
Metaphorically, we are now in a similar place as the truck guided by ruts in the mud. The ruts of conditioned programming in our collective outlook restrict the ability to see the underlying forces that shape life.
The ruts in the road take many forms.
One of them is the human need to categorize people or viewpoints as a simplistic way of grappling with complexity. While rationally convenient, it creates a…
