Embracing Uncertainty As A Factor, Not A Flaw

For at least my entire career in selling and business, we have sought to eliminate uncertainty.

We seek to put in place processes and methodologies to increase our success.

We embrace data to help us better understand, manage, and forecast performance.

We leverage data to better target our customers and analyze their engagement with us.

We leverage tools, technologies, AI to improve our abilities to achieve our goals.

We have all sorts of analytics focused on eliminating uncertainty.

We seek to architect and engineer everything we do in our GTM strategies to eliminate uncertainty.

We apply scientific methods to extend our capabilities, driving higher levels of certainty, forgetting that scientists have, for decades, embraced uncertainty as a factor and not a flaw.

What would happen if we could start to embrace uncertainty as a factor in everything we do, not a flaw in our strategies and execution?

How do we see uncertainty in business and sales? We have to recognize the complexity of human behavior, consequently are very unpredictable. Decisions are influenced by emotions, changing needs, changing opinions, external factors, and unconscious bias. Regardless how sophisticate our tools, how much we might analyze behavioral styles, each person is different, and each person changes over time.

We have also recognize these human factors are not just something that occurs with our customers. It is what drives the behaviors of everyone in our own organizations. Each of us is influenced by our emotions, changing needs, opinions, external factors and unconscious biases. And these are different with each person, each situation, and change over time.

Human interactions are complex and uncertainty is a part of all human interaction. While we have many tools that help us better manage these variations, we will never eliminate uncertainty.

Markets are also uncertain. As much as we do analyses to better understand the dynamics of the markets, as much as we leverage tools to provide better predictability, things are constantly changing. Just look at wild day to day jumps in the stock markets. Look at the levels of disruption, turbulence and VUCA every organization experiences.

Uncertainty is a factor in everything we do in business and selling. Learning how to work with uncertainty, reducing it where we can but embracing it where we can’t is critical to our growth and success.

Uncertainty is, also, a source of opportunity! Embracing uncertainty opens the door to innovation, learning, and change. If you reflect on how selling has evolved over decades, the strategies, processes, programs, methodologies, tools, analytics and execution have all been changes driven by what we see happening in our businesses. Embracing uncertainty as a method for extracting more certainty or predictability is foundational to our growth and success. We can learn from our experience, changing and adapting to the changes we experience in our customers/markets.

Recognizing uncertainty as an opportunity, improves our flexibility and adaptability. When we encounter things we haven’t expected, we have the ability to pivot and adapt. We learn, grow and overcome setbacks. By contrast our inability to recognize uncertainty and incorporate it into our strategies and execution, results in lower levels of performance and lost opportunity. We try to shoehorn customers with very differing views into our “certainty based models” of how things get done. And they are resisting our “shoehorning.”

For years, we have sought to address uncertainty with “probabilistic thinking.” We leverage data, analytics, and modeling technologies to assess potential outcomes–focusing on those offering the higher probabilities of success. But even within these modeling, we have to have the flexibility to accommodate variations and differences.

We have long had tools that help use better accommodate these differences. Tools like scenario planning, help us, organizationally develop alternative courses of action. Collaborative discovery, insight, teaching, learning, and collaborative conversations help us with each customer situation. They give us the ability to be more flexible in our GTM and our opportunity strategies.

Recognizing uncertainty as a factor in what we do, not a flaw requires us to build resilience, individually and organizationally. Learning how to change and adapt is a foundational skill. Creativity, continuous improvement, constant experimentation, open/growth oriented mindsets enable us to more effectively embrace uncertainty.

We have long looked to data to help understand and reduce uncertainty, but we have to understand the limitations of data and analytics in an uncertain world. We have to think of data as a guide, not a dictator.

Science has long learned how to embrace uncertainty. In fact it is that uncertainty that drives much of scientific discovery.

As we seek to embrace scientific approaches to how we sell, we have to, simultaneously, embrace uncertainty as part of everything we do.

Uncertainty is always a factor, not a flaw.

Embracing uncertainty could be an advantage.