What is the relationship between not-knowing and taking action?

An exploration of how uncertainty (not-knowing) relates to action and activism

Note:  This material is derived from Jennifer Atlee's Jan 2006 Salon session,  but is not a report on it.  That session's convening inquiry was "if we don't know what we're doing, what is effective action, and how do we get started?"  The notes from that session complement this wiki entry.

If we want to take action -- or are taking action -- we usually have at least a general sense of what we like or don't like, or want or don't want.  But we may not know (or at least be certain of) certain things relevant to our action, including:

• what's going on - the real context in which we're living / working
• what larger purpose we are serving or what larger social or evolutionary forces are working through us
• what the real problem is - the deeper causes or needs
• the specific larger thing we want to do - our intention, purpose, mission
• where we want to go, what desirable outcome(s) we're aiming for - our vision
• how to get there - strategy, tactics, resources, plans, colleagues
• certain information we feel we need to make particular decisions
• what's possible
• what our unique role is or should be
• the actual future outcome(s) of our actions, what difference we will make - results
• which things to do first or to focus on - our priorities
  

Given that we may not know one or more of these things, how shall we act?  The following are different but in no way mutually exclusive ways that not-knowing (uncertainty) can usefully be related to action:

• Act anyway.  Most simply and directly, we can take our best-guess action without knowing everything we would like to know before taking it.  This includes having courage and being willing to take risks.  This approach may be driven by desperation:  the situation is very bad or urgent and we feel that something simply must be done -- Now!  Ultimately, since we can never know everything about a situation, this factor is present to some extent in every action we take.
  
• Engage people.  Our own not-knowing can help us motivate people -- especially through asking questions, inviting people into inquiries with us, and/or convening conversations.  What we don't know can be used to engage people and even help them make self-defined shifts or breakthroughs (as in Listening Projects and Strategic Questioning).  We (from a place of not-knowing) can use many conversational methods to help people find out what THEIR yearning, need or vision is -- and then they (from a place of knowing that desire clearly) can use conversational methods to determine the action they wish to do.  We can thus use our unknowing to release clarity about the direction a person, community or system wants to go (as opposed to where we think they should go).  Future Search, World Cafe, Open Space, Study Circles, and various visioning activities operate here on the collective level.
• Relax.  Not-knowing can relieve our stress.  The fact is that we never totally know with full certainty ANYTHING.  Coming to terms with this -- realizing that we are not letting go of knowing, per se, but rather letting go of the illusion that we actually totally know things (which moves us into a useful awareness of the relativity of our knowing) -- can give us much peace of mind as we choose our actions.  "Letting go of outcome" is an example of this.
• Dream.  We can bypass the fact that we don't know how to do what we're doing or exactly where we're going and instead use the evocative power of possibility as our orientation. This includes formulating visions and using our dreams to call ourselves forward -- or helping others do this for themselves.  Visions give meaning to life and inspire action to deal with the fact that we may not know how to get there or how exactly it will all turn out.
  
• Manifest with Trust.  Closely related to the last two items, we can keep in mind our intention or direction while letting go of our attachment to any specific outcome -- allowing, inviting or invoking our fellows or "the universe" to co-create the outcome with us.  We do this out of a trust that what is best -- "what is best" in a larger sense, beyond our personal preferences and knowing -- or what is ready to manifest (ripe) -- will come about if we make adequate space for it and stay alert to noticing it.  This opens the door to valuable surprises.  This "let go and let God (or some other higher power)" attitude invites less visible forces to work with us.  This can include invoking the nascent future, itself.  Presencing is a sophisticated form of this.  In Otto Scharmer's "U-Curve" model of presencing, the nascent future is sensed in the present and then pursued by creating and studying prototypes (which is a form of learning system, below).
• Learn.  We can use our not-knowing in its proper role in a learning system.  We can study what we don't know.  We can do action learning -- taking action, noticing what happens, and creating new understandings and prototype actions from what we learn.  There are many ways to create learning systems, such as those described by Peter Senge and George Por, the field of Communities of Practice, etc. 
  
• Commit tentatively.  This derives from several of the other items on this list.  As Donald Michael says, "Tentative commitment means you are willing to look at the situation carefully enough, to risk enough, to contribute enough effort, to hope enough, to undertake your project. And to recognize, given our vulnerability our finiteness, our fundamental ignorance -- we may well have it wrong. We may have to back off. We may have to change not only how we're doing it, but doing it at all. And then do so!"
  
• Consult spirit or intuition.  We can shift our guidance center-of-gravity from outer knowledge to inner knowledge or transcendent knowledge.  We can listen to what the whole (or evolution or the world or God) wants of us, what our heart says, what our intuition indicates.  In other words, we can listen to our callings, individually and/or collectively.  Ideally, this is combined with outer knowledge:  We inform ourselves with outer knowledge and then let it go and look to the Center for guidance.  We make ourselves available for what wants to use us for the welfare or evolution of the Whole.  There are many practices for doing this, many of which have a spiritual base, of which Listening Into the Middle and the Quaker "waiting on the Light" are two powerful examples.  (There are also other sources of certainty than ourselves -- such as the Bible or the evolved patterns of nature, which can help us let go of our own certainty in favor of that higher Knowledge, but that isn't what this item is about.  This item is about more intuitional or direct spiritual knowing.  Oracles like Tarot cards or the I Ching can be used in either way -- to tell us what to do directly or to stimulate our own intuitions.)
• Love and flow.  We can shift our guidance center-of-gravity from certainty about the world to open-heart relationship and flowing, nonlinear interactivity.  Action then emerges from the field of the relationship rather than from particular knowledge beyond the relationship.  Examples include simply loving and honoring people and life; flowing in a field of interactive relationships (as in jazz improvisation and inspired teamwork); and practices like Nonviolent Communication, Transformational Mediation, and 4-7 day Open Space conferences.  (Understanding how difficult it is to act in the face of intrinsic uncertainty might also help us feel compassion for our fellow human beings whose ideas and actions may not make sense to us.)
  
• Move beyond positions.  Sometimes what we think we know makes it hard for us to hear each other, blocking collaboration.  So some processes actively facilitate not-knowing, to help us let go of our certainties and ideologies in order to help us find common ground and work together.  Then they usually -- but not always (e.g. Bohm Dialogue) -- help us find common ground.  Examples include Dynamic Facilitation, Open Space, World Cafe, Nonviolent Communication, and various forms of conflict resolution and deliberation that help participants see a bigger picture that includes and transcends their entrenched positions.  The emerging field of transpartisanship is very explicitly based on transcending positions.
  
• Use "swiss cheese."  Thanks to all of the above, it is often useful for a leader or group to intentionally leave a proposal or idea incomplete, or to act with more humility than they perhaps feel inside -- to set aside what they think they know (in whole or part) with the specific intention of evoking engagement from others and the world, including deeper parts of themselves.  Some call this "swiss cheese leadership" in which the "hole" in "wholeness" is actively engaged.

Some words connected with the positive use of not-knowing are humility, curiosity, trust, openness, inquiry, vulnerability, welcoming, presencing, vision, heart, and spirit.  Many people engaged in this way have spiritual insights or understandings of the new sciences (complexity, chaos, quantum, living systems, cognitive science, etc.) that make some sense of the intrinsic uncertainties of life.

Many of these processes are described on the Co-Intelligent Practices page.

An interesting article on our relationship to certainty and uncertainty is Donald Michael's Some Observations Regarding a Missing Elephant (which was usefully commented on by Paul Ray and Tom Atlee; Tom's commentary includes a summary of Donald Michael's essay).  Also of interest here is Tom Atlee's poem "Let's Nail It Down, Before It Gets Away!" about living with uncertainty at the leading edge.