7.
THE ENTREPRENEUR – DISCOVERING WHAT’S NEXT
“Not Knowing is what makes being an entrepreneur more amazing than working a regular desk job with a regular paycheck. We take risks, we fail, we don’t know what’s going to happen, we not only put our toes into the waters of the unknown … we dive in, headfirst.”
For Joseph Pistrui, Professor of Entrepreneurial Management at IE Business School in Madrid, Not Knowing is a way of engaging with the “now” to capitalize on the opportunities that it presents.
Joseph points out that as executives find themselves more and more in situations in which their own experience is not particularly useful, they need to adopt a novel approach. When operating in the unknown, they need to rely more on their ability to “sense” the circumstances laid before them, rather than “know” the circumstances based on past experience alone.
“Holding what you know and allowing that you do not know becomes a critically important framing in today’s world of leading and managing.” Joseph believes that this attitude enables executives to operate more effectively in the present and become more effective in identifying fresh opportunities.
Entrepreneurship is a way of addressing uncertainty and the unknown. “I’m seeing a transition; a move from a business ‘plan’-centred view of leading to a ‘problem’-centred view of leading. Less energy is spent on the plan while more is focused on understanding the problem which may be unknown, maybe unknowable!” For Joseph, entrepreneurship is a process of converting high uncertainty and unknowns, systematically, to the more known, through hard evidence. “When that shift in mindset is embraced, the unknown can be liberating. Working this process with others promotes divergent thinking and allows for emergent questions, such as ‘what could be?’ The historical management approaches didn’t exploit this capability,” he explains.
Joseph finds Not Knowing empowering. He believes that when we don’t have a concrete starting point, anything is possible. To this end he developed the concept of “Nextsensing,”a way for experienced executives to work with Not Knowing and become more comfortable engaging with the unknown. “Most organizations have a quite well-articulated decision gate process but at the early stage of what designers call the ‘fuzzy front end’ – what I call ‘disruptive ambiguity’ – this can be overwhelming. And when executives are in this early stage, they need to socialize their ideas. The Nextsensing process is a systematic way executives can talk themselves forward by sharing insight and building a new sense of things.”
In his work Joseph has seen the many forms of disruption, from changing data patterns, serendipity, and things that are unexpected. He argues that the challenge at this point is not to accept the first ideas that come to mind as a given, but to test them as assumptions rather than take them as fact. He works with executives to detect change early by helping them better understand the situation “as it presents itself now.” By deeply understanding the present, they are more likely to develop “presumptive hunches” that will give them insights they can use to work their way forwards.
He believes that it’s the responsibility of everyone to participate in sensing what the future of an organization could be because insights can come from anywhere, at every level. “Successful organizations and their teams will have to embrace, and engage, in Not Knowing to find their next competitive advantage.”
These diverse stories from art, science, adventuring, psychotherapy and entrepreneurship show that Not Knowing has a broad relevance, and is evidenced not only in history but also in everyday practice. Yet if we accept that there is value in Not Knowing, how are we to develop such a way of being in the world? We turn to this next.