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When you were three years old one of your greatest pleasures was to wonder about all the questions you didn’t know the answer to. Your favourite pastime was asking those questions until you exhausted every possible answer and adult. As you got older and moved through a world where people with the highest test scores got the best grades, went to the better colleges, secured the top jobs and had the nicest lives, you learned that you'd better be certain of the facts. Knowing was currency.
At school, we are rewarded for knowing the right answers. So we learn to give them, because repeatedly coming up with the wrong, or unexpected, answers can put us at a distinct disadvantage both in school and beyond. As a result, we’ve fallen into the trap of being unwilling to utter the three hardest words in the English language – “I don’t know.” The trouble is these three words are responsible for inciting all acts of creativity and igniting every breakthrough discovery.
The obvious problem is we can never be 100 percentcertain of anything, so we need to learn to act even in the face of uncertainty. The not-so-obvious problem is the more we defer to facts and data alone to shine a light on the truth, the more we neglect opportunities to nurture our inherent curiosity, develop emotional intelligence and cultivate imagination. The ability to question, to be imaginative and curious in the face of uncertainty and to act on the information we have, the things we sense but may not yet know to be true, is what enables us to pioneer, recognize opportunities and make a difference.
As Assistant Professor of Strategy at INSEAD, Nathan Furr points out; “Uncertainty is the soil out of which innovation grows.” [1] The ability to live with uncertainty makes us more open to possibility. Great ideas always seem obvious after the fact—when we have proof that they worked or some outward measure of their success. In our new data-driven world, we have increasingly come to rely on proof as a starting point, forgetting that every breakthrough idea starts not with a sure-fire solution, but with a difficult or puzzling question. Innovation, creativity and invention happen in the uncertain pursuit of truth and with the desire to solve a problem. We must remember that it's never possible to have definitive proof. What we observe in the everyday about what’s working and what’s not, why this is chosen, and that is rejected, and how the world still turns when people say one thing and do another, can lead to the seemingly insignificant insights that change everything. When we are creating ideas that will exist in the world, we must take that world into account—all of it, not just a logical, thin-sliced or convenient view of it.
We need to imagine what the truth might be without knowing for sure—which is exactly what the most innovative and successful companies in the world do. Eric Schmidt, Executive Chairman of Google’s parent company Alphabet Inc., explains that part of the secret to Google’s success is that the company is run “on questions, not answers.” [2] The innovators at Google “bring questions, to build answers”. The kind of questions that gave us electric cars, the polio vaccine and even the muesli bar—the ones that could one day bring balloon-powered internet to people in the developing world are available to all of us. Discovery is an egalitarian process.
The path to accomplishment is inevitably crossed by failure. We know failure is a key ingredient of success and that, to succeed, we must first expose ourselves to it. The ability to live with that fear—to balance risk and reward or challenge with opportunity, while staying focused on what we want the future to look like—is what enables us to pioneer and move forward. The purpose of fear and uncertainty on the journey of discovery is to signal that we might just be on to something worth working towards. That fear we experience is a sign that we care about the outcome and the impact we hope to make. Discovery, invention and innovation are about learning to live with and get beyond that fear.
Our two greatest adversaries come from within—fear of failure (which affects our willingness to take risks) and our lack of self-belief (a mindset that stops us from trying something). We just don’t like making mistakes. But according to visionary entrepreneur Elon Musk, “If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough.”[3] It takes courage to get out of your way for long enough to make those mistakes and learn from them.
Bernadette Jiwa is the author of Hunch: Turn Your Everyday Insights Into The Next Big Thing (Portfolio/Penguin Random House).
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