THE SECRET OF ENTREPRENEURSHIP IS UNVERFüGBARKEIT

The attractiveness of Entrepreneurship goes beyond the often-mentioned sense of freedom and search of meaning: it is about ‘Unverfügbarkeit’. Over the festive season, I read a short essay by German sociologist #HartmutRosa on the uncontrollability / unpredictability / unavailability / non-engineerability of the world. The juxtaposition of those different (coined) words in English tries to encapsulate Rosa's concept of Unverfügbarkeit. The more I went into it, the more I realized how strongly it resonates with the #entrepreneurial experience.

What is Unverfügbarkeit?

In this short essay, Rosa reprises his seminal concept of #resonance as something that we must experience in order to feel truly alive. The four conditions of resonance are:

• The encountering of a person, event, or even object elicits an emotional response. As the etymology of #emotion indicates, the experience moves me.
• I feel a sense of #efficacy: I can engage in an interaction with the person or event that is creating the emotion, and I can make a difference, however small.
• I experience a #transformation: I am being affected or changed in some meaningful way by the interaction. This could be in terms of personal growth, a shift in perspective, or a deepened understanding of oneself.
• Finally, there must be an element of #Unverfügbarkeit: the person, event, or object I am interacting with has its own agency, I cannot control the outcome of the interaction, which is what makes for a dynamic and living relationship.

Why does it matter?

Rosa argues that modern societies are characterized by a drive to make all aspects of life predictable and controllable, from natural processes and social systems to individual behaviors and emotions. He points out how technological advancements and rationalization efforts in modernity are primarily aimed at reducing #uncertainty, be it in medicine, engineering, or indeed management. This obsession with control leads to a loss of resonance, the meaningful and responsive relationship between the individual and the world: when everything is made predictable and controllable, the life experience becomes flat and devoid of emotion and meaning.

Through the concept of "Unverfügbarkeit," Rosa advocates for a balance between control and unpredictability: while some level of control is desirable for stability and safety, complete control eradicates the essence of living a full and resonant life.

How does it relate to #entrepreneurship?

The first three conditions of resonance are usually met with most entrepreneurial endeavors: entrepreneurs are moved by a need to change things, they act on it with the belief that they can make a difference, and inevitably they are personally transformed through the experience.

While those conditions can also be met in corporate life, though often felt with less intensity at the individual level, it is the fourth condition that makes entrepreneurship stand apart. Indeed, entrepreneurship is about embracing uncertainty and accepting that, as an entrepreneur:

• I will have to engage with people, phenomenon, situations that have their own agency; I cannot control them, I have to co-create with them a future that is not known in advance.
• In all likelihood, I’ll have to adapt often (something called iterating in the startup jargon) and occasionally change radically (something called pivoting); this is because I cannot predict what the co-creation process will yield.

Where the managerial way of doing things consists in setting an objective and then assembling the means to attain it, the early-stage entrepreneurial way consists in inventorizing the means I have at my disposal and maximizing the effect I can obtain with them. As a result, where the managerial way can only see success in meeting the pre-set objective, the entrepreneurial way can see success in many different outcomes that cannot be pre-defined. It is this Unverfügbarkeit of the outcome that makes the entrepreneurial journey so attractive and fulfilling to entrepreneurs.

NOTE: To hear Hartmut Rosa speak (in English) about Unverfügbarkeit see: https://youtu.be/XPuwPw1QX9o?si=fJukawvdpc0OsJwh

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