Finding comfort with uncertainty

As a child, I remember wanting to be able to predict the future. Clairvoyance meant acing every test at school and winning the lottery countless times. At the time, I hadn’t realized that fortune telling is not a helpful superpower for daydreamers and trailblazers. Instead, leveraging uncertainty in work, as in life, is a catalyst for creativity — it certainly has been for me during this past year as a Challenge Fellow at Impact Canada. What exactly is uncertainty and how can we use it to innovate?

Uncertainty describes a situation that is understood well, including what causes it and the impact it will have. However, no trends nor patterns are available to predict how the situation will evolve. The more uncertainty the greater number of possible “futures”. These futures can be either favourable or unfavourable.

We cannot predict the future, but we can create it

A recent example of creativity emerging from uncertainty comes from the COVID-19 pandemic. A need for urgent problem solving was required to keep people safe, and the world operational, without knowing how the pandemic would evolve. Many people and businesses needed to find the flexibility to navigate an unpredictable future for their work, tools, or services. Even in sectors where change is historically slow due to the practice of extensive planning and the desire for certainty, novel solutions emerged rapidly to respond to the unpredictable times. For example, in many parts of Canada, the healthcare sector placed an emphasis on keeping COVID-19 case rates low but required the flexibility to explore ways to do so as the pandemic evolved. The experience resulted in new models of care, digital tools, and health services — all of which continue to develop for other health aspects, even from innovators who never previously worked in the sector. It is a perfect case for the power of uncertainty: embracing it does not mean lacking direction and accepting all potential future states. Instead, it means having a very clear direction towards a subset of those future states where a clearly defined problem is solved, or a clear goal is achieved.

All roads lead to Rome” you just might not know which one to take

The conditions for using uncertainty in innovation

Even the most creative people in the world need a focal point from which to build their ideas. Challenges, such as those launched through Impact Canada, similarly are a focal point for open innovation competitions. They provide prize funding to a broad range of innovators by defining specific criteria and requirements, directing them to explore many possibilities (including non-traditional ones) that will achieve certain outcomes for desired future states. I have been lucky to support the development of the most recent Impact Canada Challenge, the Type 2 Diabetes Prevention Challenge (T2DP), launched by the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC). After an extensive research and consultation phase, gathering subject matter and lived experience advice, along with data to support what could be the most impactful outcomes for Canada, the T2DP goal was narrowed down to focus on finding ways to remove persisting health and social barriers that lead to an increased risk for type 2 diabetes. These barriers are different depending on the community in Canada, and thus there cannot be one overarching problem to solve but various problems experienced by each community. As a result, a Grand Challenge approach has been used to guide innovators to incorporate Challenge principles that can build on the strengths of a community to help prevent type 2 diabetes (such as by reducing stigma or increasing human-centered care). It allows innovators to create new approaches for prevention or adapt something that already exists in order to reach the Challenge goal.

Defining success matters when navigating uncertainty. Challenges set goals that are broad enough for innovators to adapt to a situation as they refine their approach or solution, but are clear enough to achieve the desired outcome. In addition, Challenges often provide supports outside of prize funding to accelerate transforming ideas into innovation, pushing participants further along towards success. Both the funder and the innovators have to embrace uncertainty, being open to multiple opportunities, events, and ideas. They work towards a successful future in lieu of a meticulously planned one. The approach allows veering off the tried and tested paths which only produce already known results and ideas, but do nothing to address persisting problems.

A problem well defined is half solved
- Charles Kettering

Uncertainty does not mean risky business

Embracing uncertainty isn’t the acceptance of risk, which is the possibility of loss and is measurable unlike uncertainty. To innovate means limiting losses while exploring and testing uncertainty. Challenges carefully define goals and parameters for innovators to operate within, so the risks are minimal when experimenting with what might work to achieve a goal and it’s easy to pivot to a solution that works. They create the conditions for a nothing to lose experimentation approach, using uncertain possibilities for potentially huge pay-offs. For example, at all stages of the T2DP Challenge, there will be benefits for PHAC, for innovators, and ultimately for people communities in Canada from sharing ideas and exploring different ways to prevent type 2 diabetes. The benefits can include, but are not limited to, new partnerships and opportunities to collaborate, new organizations becoming active in diabetes prevention and shared ways of understanding, measuring or responding to being at risk for type 2 diabetes. Endeavours like Challenges, de-risk the act of breaking out of a pattern of reproducing known successes which limits creative exploration.

Uncertainty is the only certainty there is, and knowing how to live with insecurity is the only security
- John Allen Paulos

The unknown does not have to be scary

Working with uncertainty can be scary but doesn’t have to be. I am 100% certain of my uncertain future and it doesn’t scare me. In fact, when people talk about “future proofing” I like to think of it as working towards only the parts of the ideal future that meet our goals. All the other parts will fall into place even if we don’t quite know how. Believe me — I’m still no clairvoyant but it’s worked out very creatively for me.