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The Paradox Of Uncertainty

Getting out of the military was an easy choice for a number of reasons.

First, the challenge and excitement just weren’t there anymore. You can only do the same thing for so long before becoming complacent, and chasing bad guys wasn’t something I wanted to be lackadaisical about—for me or for the guys I worked with.

Second, there’s an emotional toll that weighs down heavily upon each operator after constantly being “on the hook” for global threats or crises to arise.

Of course, there was also the bureaucratic BS that pervades every organization. Different leaders reacted differently to stress. Some comported themselves well and put the mission first while others allowed stress to impact their decision-making. I use the word “allowed” because that’s just what it is: a choice to open oneself to external influences because the core self lacks the self-awareness to slap adversity in the face and say, “Get outta here. I got this.”

Most of our actions at the operator level relied upon the decisions made by senior leaders, and if the decision-making process stalemated for any reason, then momentum lagged across the whole organization—as did results. When this happened—when there was an impetus for action but a lack of contextual awareness—there was only one thing us operators could do: we needed to adapt. We needed to make use of the minimal guidance we had because the problem set (i.e. the threat or crisis) wasn’t going to go away, and the only way to solve it was to fill the gap.

Gaps are temporary oversights: fissures in a foundation that, without the sort of direct pressure that stops bleeding, will eventually turn into large cracks that ultimately upend the foundation and render it incompetent, unserviceable, and/or irrecoverable.

And there are gaps everywhere in life and in organizations—communication gaps, personal meaning and fulfillment gaps, character gaps, leadership gaps. The list goes on.

You name it, and at some point there is a gap that exists at any one of the physical, mental, emotional, or social levels that drive individual and organizational performance. Why? Because shit happens. Uncertainty unfolds.

What you relied upon to get “here” no longer works, and so you must find a new way to get “there.” But, the trouble is, “there” is uncertain because it’s new, so getting to a new destination requires not only the skill and will to adapt to change, but also the awareness of the need to do so.

The impetus for change, whether it be personal, professional, or organizational, is not always obvious. Filling the organizational gap requires a keen understanding of not only one’s particular organizational silo or specialty but also a broad contextual awareness about yourself, how your individual skill set fits across the company’s, what you want out of work, and how your skills and expertise support the company’s mission and values.

In my special operations experience, anything and everything that we faced was situated amongst a global network of uncertainty, one that continually morphed based on the interdependency that comprised geographically dispersed terrorist cells and the rate of technological change they adopted. The faster the enemy learned our targeting methods and techniques, the faster we needed to think and act to stay ahead of the curve. What allowed us to do that was—among other things—having a clear purpose.

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The circumstances that people and businesses face today in terms of growth, change, and interdependence cannot be solved with the same line of thinking that got them there. There must be something new. Something revolutionary that puts your brand, your product ahead of the rest. If your business operates using the same model it has for the past five, ten, or twenty years, then it’s already obsolete because the very definition of growth entails change.

The change that individuals and organizations face today is never black and white and never gives way to simple solutions. To remedy chaotic situations requires a chaotic approach, one that is nonlinear, constantly morphing, and continually sharpening its competitive edge with recurring feedback loops that build upon past experiences and lessons learned. Improvement cannot be sustained without reflection.

Chaos arises from myriad sources that stem from two origins: internal chaos rising within you, and external chaos being imposed upon you by the environment. The result of this push/pull effect is the disequilibrium that you feel in your heart, mind, body, and soul, and which manifests itself as confusion, anxiety, lack of fulfillment, or despair.

At the individual level, chaos stems from both the known and the unknown—the awareness of a particular end-state; the fear, doubt, trepidation, or lack of experience we have in a particular arena; or from the personal change we experience either as a result of learning something new or an unwanted force that’s pushed upon us from the outside. Managing the chaos imposed by these influences is what separates winners from losers. Why? Because the uncertainty that you face as a human being proliferates into every corner of your life, such that your personal chaos gives rise to challenges in your profession, and the chaos of the workday compounds the tension felt in your personal life. Without the ability or knowledge of how to manage himself physically, mentally, emotionally, or spiritually, you fall prey to depression, despair, and general shittiness.

Types of Unknowns

There are two types of unknown factors that can spiral into chaos, what I call the “Fudge Factor” and the “Oh, Shit! Factor.” The Fudge Factor refers to known unknowns, or things that you know exist but can’t quite quantify. For example, you may leave work Monday between 5:00 and 5:30 p.m. because you know the longer you wait, the more traffic will build up. You know traffic exists but you’re not sure how much, so you build in a Fudge Factor of time that’s high enough to compensate for what you believe will be a worthy delay. You can estimate the delay because you know it’s there, but you don’t know how much or for how long.

The Oh, Shit! Factor is just the opposite: unknown unknowns that arise out of nowhere (i.e. the external environment) that always seem to bite you in the ass at the most inopportune time, and these are the little “pleasantries” that Murphy (of Murphy’s Law infamy) likes to throw at us. Planning on going to work early but your car doesn’t start? Oh, shit! Bought a ridiculously overpriced house because of a promised year-end bonus that never materialized? Oh, shit! In a firefight and your weapon jams? Oh, shit! You get the idea.

Whether it’s the military, business, or a competitive event, every single mission, deal, or play has the possibility of failure—for uncertainties of either the Fudge or Oh, Shit! variety to occur. The question is, how do you deal with such uncertainty?

During my tenure on the SEAL Teams, every enemy situation we encountered necessitated a slightly different approach, a tweak here and a new technique there. No two targets were ever the same, and each one had its own personality, its own outcome, and its own plan for how we attacked and ultimately executed it. We could never ascertain with 100 percent certainty what the enemy’s intentions were or how they would respond, simply because there were just too many variables to consider.

And you know what? Business is no different.

The Paradox of Uncertainty

Uncertainty may appear boundless—limitless—but the very absence of certainty affords an equal opportunity to create it.

Random life tests like to spring up out of nowhere at the most inopportune times—led by that guy Murphy and his damn law—as a means to test us and challenge our physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual fitness as we attempt to confront these challenges head on. Possessing a balance of physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual fortitude is what allows us to endure amidst ambiguity, tackle any challenge, and say, “I got this.” The challenge, of course, is that not everybody knows how to maximize his or her potential.

I have been fortunate in my life to have seen and experienced levels of performance that some people can only dream about, human achievements that bear no scientific explanation and no quantifiable evidence to explain how. And it all occurred under uncertain conditions.

If you consider the phenomena of certainty and uncertainty you can see an inextricably linked marvel: the fact that one cannot exist without the other. In other words, the very lack of certainty yields a one-way path toward certainty for the simple fact that nothing can be more uncertain than it already is. I know, this is deep, but hear me out.

Look at it this way: remember all those “F’s” you received on your research papers in school? (Maybe that was just me.) Getting a big red “F” at the top of a research paper says it all (i.e. “you suck”) as there was no “F” minus because you couldn’t really do any worse than you already did. “Bad” is bad, “suck” is suck, there is no “badder” and you can’t suck any more than you already do. The same principle applies to uncertainty. From uncertainty one doesn’t become any more uncertain. It’s like hitting rock bottom—and from rock bottom, the only place left to go is up.

So, what exists with both certainty and uncertainty is an interdependent system; a world, situation, or whatever you want to call it that only occurs based on the evolution and existence of the other.

No matter what system you employ to defeat the other, there are certain principles that govern certitude in human nature. For instance, you can’t have trust without honesty. Likewise, there can be no learning without humility, no selflessness without service, no innovation without disruption, no leadership without followership, and no fitness without “fatness” (kidding, but you get my point). What I’m trying to say is that each element depends on its reciprocal for two things:

1 Its existence

2 Its solution

The dichotomy that uncertainty presents, then, is both a serendipitous and deliberate opportunity to create something from nothing, to find opportunity where others see conclusion. After all, only from chaos can calmness emerge.

There is chaos we deal with as individuals, teams, and organizations; chaos that presents itself at the most inopportune times, and requires you to zig when you’d rather zag. No matter where you are, chaos finds you, and if you don’t know how to deal with change as an individual or as an organization, then you get eaten, swallowed whole, and left for dead.

The alternative, of course, is to never leave the womb. Or, once you do, to revert back to your safety net immediately after you realize that the waters you’re in are too cold and won’t suffice.

Anybody can perform a task that he or she already knows and understands. It’s when obscurity, doubt, and stress are interjected into the equation against the backdrop of survival that the creature of the unknown exposes us for who we are, not just what we know how to do.

Of course, not all chaos is bad. Nobody learns from personal successes as they do from personal failures, from what he or she should have done or said (or not). Just as uncertainty and change spur fear and trepidation, tackling the unknown makes you better because it forces you to call upon judgment and insight that you can use to make better decisions and navigate change next time. Let me illustrate this through the following example…

The Strategy of Movement

Consider this hypothetical situation:

You and your team of twelve are in a hellacious gunfight. Bullets are ricocheting off the rocks of the mountain slope you’re on and hitting all around you. You’re wondering to yourself not if but when that next enemy bullet is going to skip off a rock and lodge into your gut. Meanwhile, the guy next to you—your shooting buddy—is cracking jokes from behind cover, “Whooooh hoooo! Just like fuckin’ Vietnam!” despite the fact that he’s under the age of thirty.

Meanwhile, the enemy has identified your position and bullets are flying at you that elicit two responses from you, the fearless team leader. The typical first response is, “Fuck! We need to get the hell outta of here!” But it’s the second response that’s the real moneymaker: “Where can we go?” In other words, you begin to assess the terrain for a better position. You first begin to scan the surrounding area for alternative sources of cover because you’re not going to go running into a hail of bullets without first identifying the next safe position to move to. You want to make sure that another—better—vantage point does, in fact, exist before you order the team to move.

Once you decide upon the next best place to run for protection, you determine if the cover itself is viable for its intended purpose, which is complete tactical superiority over the enemy. Will that tree serve the purpose that I need of stopping bullets? I haven’t exercised lately, so maybe I should find a tree with a wider base. If the area in question will not do what you want it to, then you need to keep looking.

But, if it is worthy of protecting your now puckered-up backside, then you need to pinpoint the right time to move, to change. When the opportunity presents itself, you make a deliberate decision to get up with your team, shoot back at the enemy while screaming a loud, Rambo-like “AAAAAHHHHHHH!” and then run like hell toward your newfound sanctuary. Once there, you discover that this new piece of cover really only offers a fresh perspective in one of four ways:

1 It provides both cover and a fresh angle of attack on your enemy that will enable you to protect yourself, gain perspective, and win the fight.

2 It offers mediocre protection and partial exposure (at this point, you’re just prolonging the nightmare).

3 It serves as a great defense but obstructs all lanes of visibility, therefore hindering your situational awareness and ability to respond.

4 It is actually a bush and bushes do not stop bullets. It fails miserably and you die.

The Lesson

The bottom line is, if you have to move in a firefight, the marketplace, or a job role, you do so for one main reason: to strategically improve the position of your team or organization. Any discomfort, whether it be physical, mental, emotional, or spiritual, is secondary. If you aren’t experiencing discomfort, trepidation, or failure, then you’re doing something that will bring about far graver consequences: you’re trying to avoid it altogether.

In the hypothetical gunfight scenario, change only occurs when its significance has garnered the shared attention of everyone involved. You don’t just move because the leader told you to. You change position because there is meaning and purpose associated with the behavior to move.

Failure can’t be out-thought, out-strategized or out-worked. It’s an element of uncertainty that appears unexpectedly and challenges you to reveal the real you through new circumstance.

To bounce back from failure and change for the better requires effort, courage, and the tenacity to see things through—all performance-based criteria that will be covered in upcoming chapters—but the risk of not changing far outweighs the temporary discomfort of the change itself.

The purpose of moving is to gain the high ground; to adapt amidst a changing threat toward a new situation based upon a new stimulus and thus create new meaning. However, your ability to move—to create value—depends on the people with whom you work, their individual and team-based competencies, their internal drivers for excellence, and their support network. This is where performance and leadership come into play.

Continuing with the above hypothetical situation, the first goal of the leader is to make sure that everybody is shooting in the right direction, and toward the same end-state such that everybody’s efforts align toward the same purpose. There are a few assumptions made in this statement of “everybody is shooting in the right direction” that are important to highlight here. When people, teams, or companies share the same purpose it is presumed that:

1 Communication is clear. There is no ambiguity as to whom the enemy or competitor is, their position, and what resources they are employing against you. Every employee must be able to identify the battle because if you know your enemy, then you know how to defeat him. It’s when you don’t necessarily know your enemy intimately enough that the unforeseen arises and takes a bite out of your ass.

2 The team is working in alignment. The muzzle of each team member’s rifle must be pointed in the same direction to maximize potential, reduce wasted efforts, and share the same purpose. Whether you are in a gunfight, a pricing war, or a product battle, every second you lose is three more seconds you now need to advance—one second to collect yourself, one second to catch up, and another to get ahead.

3 “Winning” has been defined. There is no confusion about what success looks like, and everybody is on the same page to get there.

4 Operating environment is understood before moving. At some point, one side will have to turn the page and gain higher ground, conduct a flanking maneuver, or create some sort of change in an effort to tip the scale in their favor. A systemic understanding of the competitive landscape allows you to beat the enemy to the metaphorical high ground.

5 Skill and performance standards exist. Of course, if you want your top sniper to take the shot or your number one negotiator to land your next deal, it is expected that he or she will do so. It’s an ungrateful responsibility, but one for which physical, mental, and emotional performance demands require a standard of excellence.

Once the team is aligned and shooting in the right direction, you will need to relocate and create a new formation since the enemy already knows your current position. So, what do you do? You change. You adapt and repurpose the team in such a way that the right people fall into the right places and you have the right fit. This also entails removing the wrong people (although not in the middle of a firefight), which only comes after you identify the performance-based skills (i.e. behaviors) that each member brings to the table and how they help or hinder your team’s objectives.

Meanwhile, back in the gunfight, your team’s effectiveness is decreasing by the second, so you want to keep a heavy volley of fire on the enemy to keep him suppressed. In other words, you don’t want any lulls in the exchange of fire. To do this, the heavy weapons guys (.60 gunners) need to “sing” with each other at a rhythmic pace such that only one heavy weapon is firing at a time. If both fire, then you run the risk of both your heavy weapons running out of ammo simultaneously and the team revealing itself for the smaller, inferior force they really are. A constant volley of heavy fire deceivingly portrays yourselves as resourcefully superior and helps you appear much larger than the smaller force you are. There needs to be somebody with an overall view of the battlefield that can see and anticipate threats before they arrive and before they make your team obsolete. This is the essence of communication—to have complete awareness of the battlefield/industry such that every contributing member/department has the right information to make decisions. This is also the essence of effective leadership.

Shoot, Move, Communicate

We have a saying on the Teams: “Shoot, move, communicate.” It’s the essence of how we function together, and the lessons of “shoot, move, communicate” carry over to the business world. Shooting is a very technical skill that requires a complete understanding of the fundamentals (body positioning, breathing, trigger squeeze, and follow-through), and environmental factors (wind direction and sun position). Together, they all contribute to the myriad sources of information that you must consider to make the right decision, and pull that trigger at the most opportune time so that the bullet can find a home. To shoot is to make a decision based on a confluence of information. To actually pull the trigger is to take action, to lead, and to create value for others that inspires behavior.

Now, the only way to advance your performance from beginner to intermediate to advanced (to badass) is to not only grasp the fundamentals, but to apply them. Every. Single. Day. This requires not only incredible amounts of discipline, focus, self-awareness, and social awareness, but also the ability to harness and collectively apply them through one’s physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual capacities. All of these things together determine performance.

While shooting is performance-based criteria that defines a SEAL’s action, moving is our adaptation—our ability to change based on a need. This could take the form of physical adaptation (changing locations in a firefight, for example), personal adaptation (changing opinions or behaviors), or organizational restructuring (changing organizational culture or strategy). Whatever the impetus or the type of movement, the one constant is that to move is to learn, as you shift from what you once knew to be right into the unchartered territory that you now believe to be the new right. Humility is fundamental here, too, as it’s what enables you to release your previously held mental models and move forward.

Finally, there’s communicate. Communication is more than just the who, what, or why of a message. To communicate effectively entails a “we, not me” focus, and it is what inspires the action of the aforementioned elements. You will see the principle of communication revisited again and again throughout the stories in this book, for knowledge sharing is the lifeblood of any individual, team, or organization. To communicate effectively is not only to fulfill an obligation, but also to be a good team member; to be proactive and share anticipatory situations before they unfold so as to build context among the team. It is also what fuels strong leadership, another cornerstone of SEAL-style performance.

From the hypothetical gunfight scenario above, you can see that a well-developed plan means little in the face of bullets and suicide bombers. It requires comprehensive skill and insurmountable will on behalf of every team member to turn that well-developed plan into a well-executed mission and realize it in the face of the unknown. A lack of physical competence to perform or learn a new skill, for instance, does nothing to build one’s confidence, which falls under both mental and emotional capacities. As a mental capacity, confidence comes in the form of self-talk, positive affirmations that in turn build one’s emotional capacity. Similarly, for the emotional component, self-confidence helps us feel more competent because, by very definition, we know we can rely on ourselves when given a task that we know well. Needless to say, you can see how the four pillars are all intertwined together and inextricably linked.

The premise here is two things. First, whichever side can shoot, move, and communicate together, faster is the one that will win the fight. The critical component here—of shooting, moving, and communicating—is ensuring you’re doing so effectively. Shooting more bullets, communicating more often, or moving in the wrong direction are no good without a meaningful purpose and the skill and will to pursue it. Look at it this way: as a rule of thumb, shooting without communicating the direction in which your muzzle is aimed while bullets are flying is never a good idea. Similarly, you would never just move—effectively—from point A to point B in a gunfight, merger, or negotiation without communicating your current position or your intended destination.

The second premise is that no single component achieves success alone. Shooting, moving, and communicating is a system of interrelated parts that govern and guide oneself and one’s team or organization toward success. To employ any faction independently would be an effort in futility, for it would have detrimental and/or insignificant impacts—similar to making a strategic company decision without telling anybody.

Key Takeaways

To shoot, move, and communicate in the SEAL Teams is to perform, adapt, and lead in the private sector. However, before undergoing any sort of change, you must choose the right time to adjust: too early or too late could be fateful. Thus, the significance in understanding your enemy, the operating environment, and the competencies of your team all contribute to how fast you and your organization can seize the opportunity and stay competitive.

Decisiveness, the skill and will to learn and adapt, and a shared understanding of the environment are what enable high-performing organizations to sustain high performance. But it starts with the individual.

As you can see, the three elements that made us successful on the battlefield—shoot, move, communicate—are the same principles and behaviors that make you and your business successful in the boardroom: performance, adaptability, leadership. What’s more is they can operate linearly or dynamically—in sequence or not—since each one complements the others, and that’s what the next chapter is about.