4.
REACTIONS AT THE EDGE

Sometimes it is hard to know when we are at the edge. Complex problems don’t arrive at our front door wrapped and labelled so that we can easily recognize them. The way we react at the edge can give us clues about when we are entering the unknown.

There are many ways in which we avoid the unknown. When we come close to something we do not understand, or are faced with something unexpected or inexplicable, we have a tendency to control, become passive and withdraw, analyze things endlessly, resort to catastrophic thinking (in which we assume that everything will always turn out for the worst), jump into action, getting busy or apply quick fixes. We marginalize the experience because it disturbs us too much. These are natural and mostly unconscious ways in which we cope with the discomfort experienced at the edge – a result of our survival instincts going back to the origins of the human species. The problem with this, however, is that we avoid the unknown just at the times when we would really benefit from embracing it. Our avoidance can often prevent us from staying at the edge of the unknown, and ultimately it can prevent our learning.

Common visceral reactions: ⁵²

“I get a knot in my stomach”

“It’s like something is pressing on my head, waiting to burst out”

“My heart goes 100 miles an hour”

“I get slightly dizzy”

“I start sweating”

“My mouth gets dry, my voice starts cracking”

“I become giggly, like I’m slightly drunk”

“I get fidgety, I can’t sit still”

Common language often heard in the workplace:

“I feel that I have nothing to stand on anymore. Losing the contract was a significant loss for my team”

“The take-over created such change it was literally as if the earth moved overnight. People are acting very differently today than they were yesterday”

“It’s like we’re poking around in the dark”

“Since losing my job, I feel as if things have fallen apart” “Everyday something changes around here. If it’s one initiative today, by tomorrow there’s a new one in its place. Nothing feels solid anymore”

“Just starting my new role it feels very messy. There’s nothing to hold onto”

Buddhist nun and teacher Pema Chödrön describes the experience at the edge as “groundlessness.” It’s as though a carpet has been pulled out from under our feet. With nothing solid to stand on, we can feel disoriented, confused and even panicked or terrified.

Alex Schlotterbeck, a trainee psychotherapist, describes the myriad emotions she felt when she was in between jobs.

“I get in touch with the angst of Not Knowing where the money for the next mortgage payment is coming from as I bridge the gap from one job to the next. I get in touch with the anxiety of the uncertainty. I get in touch with my pessimistic predictions when faced with Not Knowing what’s next for me and the times when I have slipped into feeling depressed. There is some comfort in the certainty of feeling down rather than the anxiety of Not Knowing. I get in touch with not being able to bear Not Knowing and so trying to take control of my life by anxiously moving away too quickly.”

Control

Feelings of mastery, agency, autonomy and control are important and are connected with our sense of wellbeing.

Neuroscientist David Rock’s work shows that when employees experience a lack of control or agency, their perception of uncertainty is also aroused, which further raises their stress levels. By contrast, the perception of greater autonomy increases the feeling of certainty and reduces stress.⁵³

Psychologist Ellen Langer, whose research on the “illusion of control” we referred to earlier (see page 93), argues that our tendency to believe we can control or influence outcomes is strengthened by stressful and competitive situations. When things are changing and becoming more unpredictable, stress levels rise and we feel more at the mercy of our circumstances. It is then that we attempt to increase our sense of control and relieve our sense of powerlessness. Control appears as a defence, an antidote to Not Knowing; a grasp for certainty. We can experience ourselves tightening or closing down. Or we can apply more power and become more directive and authoritarian. The language we use for these situations is apt: we “tighten the screws” or “lock things down.”

Common reactions:

“I start pressuring myself even more to come up with the answer” “I get really impatient with my team”

“I jump into action and take over”

“I will do anything to avoid being uncomfortable”

“I’m intellectualizing the feelings to manage them”

“I’m drowning”

“I’m so out of control"

“I completely lost control of that meeting”

“I’m going off track”

Pema Chödrön says there is a tendency to “scramble for security... and gain some ground.” She calls this “Shenpa,” which is a Tibetan word for attachment.

Chödrön describes Shenpa as having a “visceral quality associated with grasping, or conversely, pushing away... It’s that stuck feeling, that tightening or closing down or withdrawing we experience when we’re uncomfortable with what’s going on.”⁵⁴

When the pressure is on, our default position is to control through routines and familiar structures and rules. Organizations create artificial structures to give the illusion of control. Motorola’s Six Sigma management strategy, a set of techniques and tools for manufacturing process improvement, is a manifestation of our desire to control our environment. While it can be effective for simple or complicated (known unknown) problems, many business problems are complex (unknown unknowns). It is an illusion that we can achieve stable and predictable outcomes in business and “mistake-proof” activities by applying common business systems to the unknown unknowns. Will this new product work? What direction are customer tastes and preferences moving in? What unpredictable forces will have an impact on us?

Passivity & self-defeat

Common reactions:

“I become too accommodating, agreeing with whatever is being suggested”

“I become really quiet and withdrawn”

“I don’t know what questions to ask”

“If I am not 100% sure, I’ll tend to sit and become silent, especially if I don’t have the detail backing me”

“I look to my manager to do something. After all, it’s his responsibility”

“I lose my confidence”

“My brain feels like it is in sleep mode”

“I can blame myself and others”

When we are faced with a sense of groundlessness, one of our default responses is to move away from our feelings and to isolate ourselves using worry or depression. The problem seems catastrophic and we don’t know what to do or how to cope. We tend to want to escape from the place that scares us, which is a natural human reaction. The mix of uncomfortable feelings and reactions is strong and we can easily be pulled into the feeling of depair.

Analysis paralysis

Common reactions:

“We need to form a committee to discuss this”

“We don’t have enough data to make a decision”

“We need more information before I’m happy to sign off”

“I’d like to read the report by ABC consulting that comes out next month before we go ahead with the rollout”

We often avoid tackling a complex problem by trying to analyze and gather more information. We erroneously think that our difficulty with solving a complex problem is due to our lack of knowledge. If only we read more, researched more, became better at our jobs, we would be able to come up with the answer. The challenge with this thinking is that when we are dealing with a complex challenge, which may well be difficult to define, let alone solve, we may never get to the bottom of it. We may never know enough, or become competent enough to be able to solve it. The risk is that by the time the analysis is complete, the problem has changed shape, become too entrenched, or it is simply not a problem any more, thus rendering all our planning redundant.

Over-analyzing can be a way to procrastinate and avoid action because it is a comfortable, known way to tackle a problem. However, as Nicola Gatti, CEO of AWS24, learned: “It is better to move on with imperfect knowledge, based on your capacities and instincts, than to wait for knowledge. This is preferable even though you could miss some valuable chances in this fast-moving world.”

Catastrophic thinking

Catastrophic thinking is exaggerating the consequences of a problem, and defaulting to the “worst-case scenario” of what could possibly go wrong. Not only do we dislike the experience, we believe that we are unable to cope or do anything to change it.

Common reactions

“I will never get out of this situation”

“I’ve got it wrong and now all is lost”

“They’ll see how dumb I am and I’ll lose people’s confidence in me”

“If I lose this contract the company will fold”

“I have totally lost my mind. I can’t think straight. I’m such a failure” “How can I show my face at work tomorrow? I would rather die!”

Karen Loren,⁵⁵ a management consultant, describes a time when she was feeling stuck in an unfulfilling role and was searching for what might reignite her passion:

“Drowning in thoughts about the future, I got caught up in a cycle of desperately searching for jobs and feelings of panic from not knowing what I wanted. Despair and panic soon took up residence in my thoughts and my gut was plagued by a persistent ache. My imagination went wild with the fear. I had visions of jumping feet first into a totally new field and ending up homeless because it all went horrendously wrong. I fantasized about reaching retirement and still not having figured it all out.”

Jumping into action

Common reactions:

“We were managing the anxiety of Not Knowing by throwing all our knowledge and expertise at it”

“We kept coming up with plan after plan, rushing from one task to another like headless chooks”

“What’s the point of meeting and leaving without a clear set of actionable tasks?”

“We got stuck down the rabbit hole of expertise by brainstorming the problem to death”

“I don’t have time to play with questions. We are here to get a job done, and quickly”

Making decisions may promise immediate gratification. The rush of relief that can come straight after a decision has been made may be similar to a hit of sugar. It can initially give us a boost, but it can eventually take us further “down” than where we first started. Many workplaces have a low tolerance to uncertainty, so we apply “a 30-second rush to value.” We tend to intellectualize the problem and lower the discomfort of Not Knowing by providing superficial answers. Feeling overwhelmed by the prospect of appearing incompetent, we succumb to the pressure to act. A human resources manager in the insurance industry explains:

“I alleviate the discomfort of Not Knowing through over-thinking. I need to appear competent in my area of expertise. I am expected to know and I expect to have the answer. I become even more impatient, rushing through decisions, fixated on the outcomes.”

Resistance

How does resistance feel?

“I can feel it in my body”

“I get headaches, like a vice, a force that pushes on my head” “There is a heaviness on my chest, I can’t breathe”

“I feel a pressure, constraining me, locking me down”

“It is a limiting belief about myself”

“I feel stuck. The more I struggle, the more stuck I get”

“For me it’s like I’m wading through murky waters or thick mud” “It’s like I’ve come to a dead end”

Resistance is a pushing away of the present, usually as a reaction to change and the loss associated with change. It could be resistance to something that is unpleasant or negative, something that we fear or dislike or is too difficult to see. When we are resisting, we are wishing for things to be different.

Author Nick Williams left a successful corporate life in which he appeared to have everything he wanted because he felt something was missing. After nine years in three corporate jobs in his 20s, he felt an impulse to leave and start his own business. That was before the Internet, and before social media and downshifting and the idea of portfolio careers.

“I felt like I would be stepping off the edge of the world I knew if I did that, committing career suicide, letting everyone down after I had worked so hard to get where I was. I feared I would become alienated. I had always followed the rules, played a role and done what I thought I was supposed to, but it wasn’t making me happy.”

Nick recalls a moment, almost 10 years later, when his resistance came up strongest, after signing his first book contract and becoming a writer. Since childhood he had a sense that writing was something he was born to do, a part of his calling. However, at 38 years old he had not written a single book.

In the summer of 1997, he had been germinating ideas around the theme of finding and living the work “you are born to do.” He was beginning to do workshops and talks on this theme, and a book seemed like a natural next step. He decided to submit a proposal to the six largest publishers in the UK, and to his surprise, one publisher asked to meet with him. Nick was glad that he had taken action, but a deep-seated part of him did not believe he would be successful. He had heard too many stories of crushing rejection letters, or worse still, no reply at all.

On 1 September 1998, a letter fell through his letterbox onto the carpet. Nick remembers picking it up and seeing the publisher’s logo on the envelope. Suddenly he was filled with a great fear of rejection. He opened it quickly to get it over and done with. He wanted to confirm that he was not good enough, but congratulate himself in a perverse way that at least he had tried. As he opened the letter, he was stunned. It said “Congratulations, we are happy to offer you a contract for your book.” “I was speechless and had a moment of elation. But then the ‘dragons’ I call my resistance surfaced. I had thoughts such as ‘what have you done!? You can’t write and you’ve made a mess by convincing people you can’, ‘who will read anything you write, surely the books will end up in the remainder bin’. I even thought to myself ‘I can’t write, what if it’s terrible and it’s even wasting trees’. Such was the strong voice of my resistance.”

Change always involves loss. We do everything we possibly can to avoid loss, even if it means achieving something we’ve always dreamed of. Not Knowing becomes even more frightening at the edge because we don’t know what we are about to step into and what we are leaving behind.