Challenge the Illusion of Certainty: Create a Development Mindset
Thank you for being here, dear Thinkers! ❤️ Your comments (and hearts) mean so much to me. I read each and every one. ♥️Jane
The mind, once stretched by a new idea, never returns to its original dimensions. Oliver Wendell Holmes
I am not a believer in testing everything. For example, caring relationships between teachers and students do not need to lead to better grades for me to wholeheartedly support it (it is about better humans).
That said, if we want to develop new ideas, try out insights, create programs and do projects, we need to know what works and what matters. And we do this by testing things out.
Businesses and organizations talk about having an “experimental mindset” in work settings. But isn’t experimentation needed across all aspects of our lives?
We live with the illusion of clarity and control and act as if our systems help make things predictable. This illusion exists everywhere. For example:
At school, we have credits, standards and curricula, with grades at the “end.”
At work, we set performance goals and are guided by a strategic plan.
Even in relationships, we often adhere to norms and expectations.
In our institutions, we believe that doctors’ diagnoses, prescriptions and treatment plans should be certainties, financial advisors’ recommendations for investing should be certainties and the politics that govern our democracy should be certain.
Anne Laure LeCunff describes it by saying, “We optimize our lives for certainty.”
Certainty is reassuring; what we know can be better understood, managed, and controlled. But intellectual certainty, work certainty, school certainty and life certainty are both unrealistic and limiting.
Where lies a certain path, possible doors leading to innovative ideas are ignored.
Most for life is full of uncertainty.
Certainty is based in a single perspective, a single way of doing, and a single way of being. As we elevate diverse perspectives and experiences, the illusion of certainty becomes even more evident.
We cannot predict the future, no matter how much we may sometimes want to hang on to those feelings of certainty - “this way,” “I know.”
Instead of holding fast to certainty, what would happen if we optimized for development?
How would leaning in to developing new routes, new ideas, and experiments for growth change our schools, workplaces and lives?
A development mindset would require experimenting in our work and our lives, testing out the ways to expand our practice and perspectives. These experiments would not need to be complex, but rather as simple as trying something. and noticing the results - cultivating more awareness.
In a development mindset, the question changes from “how do I get to the outcome?” to “what do I want to try/test out?”
The Big Idea
As School of Thought begins expanding to in person live connections, we are very interested in the concept of bias to action in experimentation. That is, choosing something small, putting it into practice, learning from it, and informing the next something to put into action.
Leaning into this kinds of experimentation makes space for:
Learning. We often take an idea and run with it without testing assumptions. We make decisions based on how we think things are. We need to lead with curiosities, and identify assumptions that underlie those curiosities.
Increased curiosity. When we open our minds to new questions, we naturally develop stronger curiosity — not only about the world, but about ourselves.
More creativity. As Christoph Niemann puts it, “a certain amount of experimentation is a helpful trait for any kind of designer.”
Deeper humility. Experimentation and continuous learning discourage arrogance and encourage growth. We don’t know what we don’t know.
Failing (in a positive way). We learn the most from what doesn’t go well. Failure is temporary; experimenting helps us advance. Failure is at the heart.1
Saving Capital. We need to accept the front end costs of failing and learning quickly. The costs of failing fast are often lower than the back end costs of implementing a large-scale promise of change that does not deliver - both in financial and human terms.
Better innovation. We need to interrogate our own perspectives and those around us. When we systematically ask questions, elevate assumptions, and document our failures (and our successes), we challenge ourselves to learn outside our comfort zone - outside our certainty zone.
What are your thoughts on this 🌶️ take? The more you try out ideas, the more likely it is that you will be testing everything. Is it worth it?
Making Big Ideas Usable
With so many tools, techniques and protocols, experimenting can seem overwhelming. We might worry that we can’t meet the standards of experimentation. We might not know where to start!
There is no one-size-fits-all type of guide to experimentation. There’s no one, no profession, no organizational type that has the lock on experimentation.
At School of Thought, we are interested in how we can encourage and democratize experimentation to expand learning. We see experimentation as a foundational element of the development mindset and an antidote to the illusion of certainty.
How does experimentation show up in your work and your life?
Can you identify areas in which you might experience an illusion of certainty? How might this offer a path to experimentation?
Where would you like to experiment more?
What are the barriers and facilitators that you see in your world to expanding experimentation?
We’d love to hear from you.
“The only way you learn to flip things is just to flip them!” Julia Child, world-renowned chef, after flopping a potato pancake onto the floor during her TV show
Essay 1 of 24 for 24 Essays Club
This piece is part of Sparkle on Substack’s 24 Essays Club - a lovely way to activate community from Claire Venus of Sparkle on Substack. It’s 24 essays by January 31st 2025. Words of encouragement from Claire, “Let’s get back to writing and connect to/ support each other along the way. Let’s do what we’re here on Substack to do! Hone our craft, release our words, find readers and collaborate.” More details here.
Note that there is a distinction between failure and mistakes. Failure has a learning objective that might not always be met, but an attempt was made to meet it. Mistakes do not.