Innovating in the Unknown – Harnessing the Power of Not Knowing

Are you stopped when you say “I don’t know what to do”? Yet many roles we admire, such as entrepreneurs, inventors, and leaders, don’t stop when they don’t know.  That is where they start.

There are skills of knowing what to do in the unknown. Instead of having to know in order to act, we need to learn to act in order to know.

The journey of leadership, as well as our journey in life, is always taking us to the unknown.  The world is changing, our situations and challenges are changing, we are changing, and the unknown is always calling us to learn, or to discover, invent, or innovate.  Yet we often refuse the call, hunkering down in what we already know, turning away from the changing world, and pushing away new opportunities because they don’t feel familiar. We strive to keep things the same, both individually and organizationally. In Italy there is a saying – “We will change everything in order to keep things the same.”

What is it about not knowing that paralyzes us?  Fear – the fear of making a mistake, of taking a step off a cliff into darkness, of showing up as incompetent or unable, of not seeing the next step on the path.  And often those are appropriate fears, often translated to good judgments of what to do and not do.  I learn to not take action when it is likely to be ineffective or even damaging.

We learn standard practices, to meet the standard of the behavior, from walking through door to delivering professional services.  And we learn to delegate to others who are competent at practices that we have not learned.  In my case, I don’t go to car mechanic school to fix my car; I go to a car mechanic that I can trust.  I have to learn to make judgments of whom I will trust in different domains, such as my physician, investment counselor, and even my grocery store. But in many areas I learn to delegate where others can do better than I.

However, in our changing world our current practices for making offers and delivering can lose their value in the face of new competition. We can’t compete with lower cost producers, or the competition innovates in a way we can’t match. We don’t have the luxury to stop, do nothing, or stay in our comfort zone.  And the issues can be so complex that no one else has the answer – even the standard design approaches are no longer adequate.  I can’t delegate. Something new has to be created. Something new has to be adopted.

Perhaps we can find our way with our current skills and interpretations in this changing world, perhaps we can leave these issues to other leaders, innovators, or wizards.  Or we can learn the skills to productively enter the unknown and become a leader, innovator, and creator of new value.

In our work with leadership development, we focus on what it takes to lead and innovate in the unknown.  First is to reorient from the unknown as a barrier and threat to the unknown as a space of possibilities.  This cannot be done as an idea, but we must have a body that can turn towards and calmly rest into the full range of possibilities, positive and negative. We must have emotional skills to shift from fear, anxiety, and resignation to moods of curiosity, captivated exploration, and even playful experimentation.

Leadership and innovation are performance arts, not just domains of ideas, models, and processes.  In the end, the shift to create from the unknown must happen with people, starting with ourselves.  By starting with inquiry rather than fear, we can open new possibilities for design and creating a new future.

One objection that arises is “there isn’t enough time!” Yet even there we can learn that limited time can produce focus.  In the famous example of the Apollo 13 mission an oxygen tank exploded and the engineers only had hours to jury rig the carbon dioxide recycling system, or the astronauts would die. In the old standard practices there was not enough time for a redesign.  By letting go of the old assumptions of the needed time and engaging with a new focus the fix was produced in time.

There are many generative productive frameworks for working with the unknown, although the framework will not be effective without the body and emotional skills to engage with them. Panic will still cause a crash of the most sophisticated tools and vehicles.

Here’s some sampling of the skills of entering the unknown as a place for creating what is missing:  design, planning, inquiry, experimentation, discovery, curiosity, invention, and even learning.  There are professions and professional practices that start with not knowing – the product managers who needs to come up with a new product, the software engineer that has to create a new kind of design, the designer with a new request from a customer.  Work such as Dave Snowden’s Cynefin framework shows how to deal with the known and unknown, complex and chaotic situations.

As leaders, having a new answer or path through the unknown does not mean that your team, organization, or community will follow you there.  Just as we overcome fear we must help others get past fear and anxiety to new possibilities. And the new possibilities require the learning and adoption of new practices.  Here is the challenge of the leader and innovator: to get a community to capably adopt new practices and let go of old ones.  In the book The Innovator’s Way, which I co-authored with Dr. Peter Denning, we explore in depth the needed skills of the innovator, including leadership.

But the key steps in the journey are not complicated: to see not knowing as a staring point rather than a barrier; to go through and beyond fear and anxiety; to open new possibilities with curiosity; to develop our capacity for creation, rather than stuffing everything new into what we already know; to learn design; and to learn to help others on the path to a new future, the adoption of new practices.

Yet being clear and even simple does not mean these abilities are trivial – they require a full body shift, and these shifts only happen through practice.  Then the path of leadership and innovation takes us to the path of learning and practice with the unknown.