Photo by Jonathan Borba.
Late last year, when we were heading into our annual planning process, the word Uncertainty kept showing up everywhere. Not in our own planning, but in all the strategic context around our planning.
Uncertainty about tariffs and regulatory climates and climate climates. And when pressed for details, the business media who were citing Uncertainty could offer no assurances and no specifics:
We don’t know what is coming or why. We don’t know what it means for governments or businesses or individual humans. We just know that it’s coming. And so, yes, we’re quite light on details but in the absence of those, our headlines will speculate about what the next set of headlines may or may not be. The only certainty, of course, being Uncertainty.
This is not such a comforting narrative. We’re a cross-border duo running a Canadian business with a lot of American clients. What does a looming, maybe hyperbolic, maybe jk lol ha ha, wait but actually serious, trade war mean across any one of those? And what does it mean across all of them?
Uncertainty wasn’t our choice for word of the year. But sometimes the word of the year chooses you.
It’s ok if you hate surprise parties
Uncertainty, in and of itself, isn’t so bad. Surprise parties. Winning lotto tickets. Skydiving. Leaving your job to found your own thing. There’s a lot of places where a lack of certainty isn’t so bad. And even better than not so bad, where it’s exciting or exhilarating.
But that heady buzz of possibility is not really what the business press mean. Or at least, the reporting sounds less like we’re holding winning scratch-off tickets and more like 50/50 odds on it all going apocalyptic. This is deeply unsettling.
It’s not that humans can’t handle change. We’re quite good at adapting to many flavours of change. In the world at large, sure. But also at work. The market is moving and we need to shift our product offerings to meet the change? We can do that.
And even when it’s not change we could have anticipated. When it’s something unexpected or something unfortunate, we can generally still rise to the occasion. Our servers went down and now our customers are frustrated? Again, not ideal but we can work together to address the situation.
The challenge in this specific moment is not that humans aren’t good at uncertainty. And it’s not that humans can’t handle big change. It’s that the combination of big change and big uncertainty makes a lot of folks freeze.
Every surfer learns this lesson early. There will be a wave that takes you out at some point. You need to know where your board is so that when you come back above water, it doesn’t hit you in the head. Unconscious in the ocean is a major problem.
There’s a second part of this lesson. And it’s that if you’re caught in a big wave, you can lose your bearings. Instead of coming up and worrying about your board, you may accidentally swim down. It is possible to get thrown for a big enough loop that you can no longer tell up from down. Totally disoriented in the ocean is also a major problem.
The thing you can’t do, even when the entire world is upside down, is freeze. Or you’ll drown. And, oh by the way, you still need to watch your head as you come back up for air.
Back on dry land
This makes sense enough in the context of surfing. But at work, on dry land, a lot of people do freeze up. Particularly when things are swirling, there’s this instinct to wait it out. Because you feel like you do have your feet under you. There are fixed points you can lean on for support. You trust your own boss. You like your team. You’ve been here for a long time and everyone knows you do good work. You can wait and see how things go. There may not even be a need to do anything at all, because most change is temporary, and then you’ll get back to baseline.
We’ve been talking to a lot of people in the midst of big change lately. Not change in priorities or OKRs, but wholesale dismantling or transformation of their work and their workplaces. Some of those people are literally US federal employees. Or caught in the middle of a fumbling, on-again-off-again trade war. Some of them are staring down a new CEO who plans to clean house. Or are part of a small shop being acquired by a giant. In any event, they are in organizations whose leaders are deliberately breaking shit.
This kind of intentionally inflicted organizational change isn’t temporary. When a leader does this to an organization, maliciously or not, their goal is to wipe out the baseline, and corrode the fixed points you rely on. That’s not an accident. They’re aiming directly at them.
Even still, many of the people we talk to are waiting. You might be one of them. Waiting to see where the chips fall and where the dust settles. Because until things clear up, there’s just this huge possibility-space of things you could do, and it’s impossible to know which ones you should do. Send that drafted email, or keep quiet. Apply to another job. Talk to your manager, or talk to their manager. Accept the promotion, or the transfer, or the resignation package. All of these things have question marks and probabilities floating above them. And you’re a smart, analytical person. You just need a little more time for the probabilities to coalesce.
We’ve been there. But listen. If we could say one thing to you and have it stick, it’s this. By the time you have good-enough information on the options, many of those options will be off the table. When a leader is creating chaos, churn, trauma on purpose, they’re buying themselves time. The longer you wait for the dust to settle, the fewer options you’ll have.
Better above water than under it
So, like. Now what? If you’re in the water, and your fixed points are gone and you don’t know which way is up and someone’s done it on purpose, but you still care about your work and your team and the people that you serve. Now fucking what?
Honestly? Now you have to act. You have to overcome the urge to wait it out, and the voice that says that you’re being rash. It’s better to be in motion than sitting still right now. If your smart, analytical mind needs a reason why that’s not foolish, tell it something about opportunity cost or loss aversion bias. Either way, get moving. That means:
- Make a list of your red lines. What is non-negotiable? Would you do five days a week in-office again? Would you layoff half your team if it meant the work could keep going? Would you agree to that work, with that client? Don’t spend time on “surely they wouldn’t” because probably they would. And having the list ahead of time will help make things clear when they do.
- Start to build your next best option. If you didn’t have this job, what would you do tomorrow? Really actually, not catastrophizing, what would happen next? We’re not gonna get sidetracked on how likely that is, we’re just trying to take down the emotional temperature that the threat of job loss represents. It messes with your head too much when you feel like you have no options, so build some.
- Figure out what work matters now. It’s probably not the weekly status meeting. But if there is information to share, a conversation to have, or a fight worth fighting, now’s the time. If there is work of yours that you need a copy of before you lose email access, or before it’s scrubbed from the website, get on it.
We know this is hard. The whole situation is sort of a huge bummer. But in the moment where you find yourself upside down in the ocean, all of your metaphorical instincts for getting to a good spot are wrong. You can’t take a deep breath. You don’t have a minute to think. Your ability to move quickly and calmly is all of it. Even when there’s nothing calm about the situation. Even when you have to move without knowing whether you’re swimming toward safety. Or away from it. You still have to move. Because your status quo is already gone.
— Melissa & Johnathan
PS – If you’re reading or rereading Octavia Butler’s Parables, us too. Perhaps obviously. And if you have no idea why that’s relevant, go get your hands on a copy. You will.
