Rabbit Hunting

I played a lot of poker when I was at university and the early stages of work. Poker has a thing called “Rabbit Hunting”. When someone makes the decision to fold, but they ask the dealer to show what the next card “would have been”. It is irrelevant. If it is truly random, you didn’t know the rabbit when you folded. All the cards still in the deck, that you haven’t seen already, could be that card. Your decision has to be made in the light of uncertainty. The world we are in is not a single safe path. There are multiple ways things can play out. You need to be able to take account of all those paths, including in how you judge yourself. Don’t judge yourself purely on how things played out. How they could have played out is just as important a part of the learning process. A decision can still be a bad decision, even if the result was good. Which is not the way that we tend to think. Success carries far less information, and far more danger, than failure. 

Future Uncertainty

We speak in chunks. A single word can connect to a world of shared meaning, or none at all. There is too much for us to understand, so we pick areas and hopefully have overlaps that allow the important bits to spread. Risk is a chunky word. When choosing a path to financial security, risk was the overlap I chose to study. Actuarial Science is a framework for making financial sense of future uncertainty. Primarily through statistical and business understanding of the past using large data sets. It takes advantage of the law of large numbers. There are different forms of uncertainty and risk. For most people, risk normally just means something going wrong. The study of risk goes wider than that. Looking at complexity, ambiguity, and the randomness of the world, and trying to find within that, “is there anything that we can rely on?”. When you look at individual instances of something, life can feel like a spin of the coin or roll of the dice. But if they are fair, there are 6 sides of a dice and 2 sides of a coin. Actuarial Science is partly the study of, and attempt to weather the storms of, “the underlying” rather than the specific result. A consideration for the variety of outcomes that is a form of “there, but for the grace of God, go I”. 

Roman Dice

Other People's Numbers

Not all good ideas are good business ideas. Good business ideas require the ability to control supply and demand. To create shape and form around an idea through barriers to entry. Demand is not good enough if supply is a free for all. It is easier to control things when you can reduce them to numbers. Which is why STEM areas (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Maths) typically make better business ideas. They focus on areas that are easier to box into products that can be paid for. A clear ask. A clear offer. Not everything can be boxed. Even good business ideas will be exposed to qualitative questions that cannot be reduced to numbers for comparison. You can force anything into a 1-5 ranking or a Yes/No binary. That is often useful just to force you to think about something, but then you have to avoid being seduced by the numbers. Falling in love with the illusion of control so much that you forget that numbers make better questions than answers. Especially when they are other people’s numbers, and you did not do the work yourself.

Not all Ones and Zeros

Plan for Being Wrong

This Covid crisis was not a Black Swan. A Black Swan is something that has never been seen before, and all the evidence has been in the other direction. Every White Swan increases the conviction that all Swans are white. All the evidence confirms a belief that is fundamentally wrong. There have been pandemics before, and there were plenty of people talking about it before 2019. Hans Rosling’s book “Factfulness” (2018) listed Pandemic as one of the 5 big risks the world faces, along with Poverty, Financial Meltdown, Climate Change and World War. Financial Meltdown, Poverty, Climate Change and War are not Back Swans either. Read the book “The Black Swan” by Nassim Taleb. By definition, you can’t predict a Black Swan. You can predict that there will be Black Swans that upend our world view. You can build shock absorbers and plan for the fact that things will not go according to plan. A more important question than “Am I right?” is “what are the consequences if I am wrong?”. Plan for being wrong. Plan for adjusting the way you see the world as you engage with it.

Unpacking Constructively

We haven’t got shared words. Words are imperfect, but useful if they connect us. If they move the conversation forward. Words are models of reality. I am a Soutie with one foot in South Africa, and one foot in the UK. After “persistent problems with salient collective terminology” (Peter Aspinall), the UK office for national statistics defines ethnicity as “something that is subjectively meaningful to the person concerned”. I reluctantly tick White African with half a nod to the colourblind dream of the Rainbow Nation, and half a nod to the reality of persistent bias in all the companies I worked in, and both countries I have lived in. The latest stab at a word for ethnicity that doesn’t sit well for me in the UK is “Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic”. BAME. “Black” people are not a minority in South Africa, and they are only a minority in wealthy countries because our Nations were consciously constructed by race. Creating minorities. Borders don’t interest me much. Religions, nations, companies, races, numbers, and words are imperfect models of a much more complicated reality. The key is unpacking constructively.

2011 UK Census Ethnic Group

I Don't Know

'I don't know' should be the three most common words in the English language. The problem is most people sell certainty. The world is complicated, ambiguous, and uncertain. No one knows. But we fly towards the light like Mosquitoes. Knowing is less powerful than resilience, endurance, and the ability to respond to whatever life throws at you constructively. We are powerful storytellers. We can connect the dots in a way that makes us think we understand the cause and effect of everything. It makes us feel powerful. Where we don't understand, we fly towards wherever the light radiates strongest. Not knowing is fine. Nothing is a bigger danger than someone who always gets it right, and always has the answer.

Selling Discontent

Negativity sells. We have a bias toward drama and extremes. Talking about slow, long-term, progress doesn't lead to the sense of urgency normally required to spark action. Marvelling at our creativity, resilience and improving ability to cooperate seems to belittle all the areas we know this isn't true.

That is why Bosses have to create fake deadlines to get us to do stuff. 'I need this on Monday morning' gets followed by two weeks till they read it. That is why opposition politicians need to convince us that the current Government is destroying our mortal souls. Until it is their turn to do stuff.  Discontent is our biggest selling product. 

I am not buying. I far prefer doing a little bit every day, and starting really early, to a mad panic near a deadline. It is almost never worth rushing. It is almost never worth being forced to make a decision. I far prefer us learning to talk to each other, to seeing which ideological stone throwing team has the biggest biceps.

This may appear like weakness. We love Strong Men who can be decisive in the face of uncertainty. We love Confidence in a world of ambiguity, uncertainty, and complexity. We define leadership by people taking confident strides so we can follow in their footsteps.

No.

What if what we have now is the best it will ever be? Tomorrow isn't better. It is just different. This doesn't mean inaction. It just means that perhaps we are already living in Utopia. Utopia isn't a world with no imperfections or challenges. All the horrible things in life provide us with opportunities to learn and grow. Perhaps the goal is the daily growth, not the destination.

From here. From now. From as things are.

'it takes all the running you can do,

to keep in the same place' The Red Queen

Confidence

Confidence is rewarded. If someone else seems to understand the world that we don't, there is a natural appeal. As you get older, you realise more and more of the people you thought knew what was going on, don't. Some people just take better stabs in the dark. Sometimes it is luck. Sometimes it is the work of others. A little bit of delusion is a good thing. If we constantly thought about how dangerous roads were, we would probably never cross them, or get into a car. Confidence is delusion. If we are good at something, it doesn't necessarily mean we will be good at something else. It doesn't mean we know why we were good at that thing. Or if we will be going forward. What it does do, is give as the ability to pretend. Pretending gives us the back bone to take the next step.

The Dark

Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity

I managed to catch up with a friend yesterday who is a big fan of the writing of David Foster Wallace. I had watched most of (the plane landed) 'The End of the Tour' recently and asked him what he thought. Movies have to create a story. One of the themes of Wallace's thinking was the 'Double Bind' that some writers have. They want to write about normal things and not appear to pretend to have things sorted out, or to be putting themselves on a pedestal, and yet to say something helpful or useful or meaningful, you have to put yourself out there. Put views out that may be a solution. The spinning wheel of self-reflection will mean you always think you are wrong, but have to carry on. 

My friend spoke of life being a combination of uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. We need to accept that we simply aren't capable of understanding everything. Of finding an answer. We can't always know in advance what 'the right thing to do is'. There aren't simple links of cause and effect. Things are never clear. There are always tradeoffs, advantages, disadvantages, costs, benefits, doubts, hopes, fears, opportunity costs and difficulties. 

I like that way of describing it and would add the idea of noise. There are lots of things that happen for no reason. That happen simply because they can. That aren't part of a narrative. Often those things are wonderful moments that come and go. That can be savoured and released. Often they are painful. They happen parallel to the story. They bump the story off course.

Patterns are fun. Patterns create stories and I think they are the only way we can view the world. It is how we are wired. Life is a combination of fact and fiction. We can join the dots in the way that we find most amusing. Most meaningful. We can create the life we want through our stories with occasional reality checks.

We will never understand. That doesn't really matter. No one will. Just keep on keeping on.

Dive In Durban Boy

Like a German spy in World War II who slips up with one word that blows their cover, you can spot a Durban boy (where I grew up) a mile away by the length of time it takes them to dive into a swimming pool when the water is even slightly cold.

Building yourself up to 'dive in' even when you have the intention of doing something sometimes takes a long time. Yes, there are those crazy Cape Town people who think cold water is the point, but a lot of the time it takes time to gain the courage. You dip your toes in. You convince yourself that you will warm up. You decide on a strategy of either doing nothing right up till the point that you dive in, or of slowly wading into the water taking the cold body bit by body bit at a time.

The uncertainty surrounding picking up a new skill or learning something new is 'cold'. Often there are competing sources of information, approaches, objectives, costs and so the uncertainty holds you back. Other times you know it is okay - you can see the benefits, you can see what you need to do, there are very limited downsides. You just need to dive in.

Even if you are a Durban Boy.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Durban

with the wonderful warm water of the Indian Ocean