Uncertainty and The Gray Area: What Business Can Learn From Science

Uncertainty has become our new normal. Well, maybe not uncertainty itself, but its incessant mentions, the constant projecting of the bat signal in the sky over our heads.

It’s like a brand new eyesore of a billboard planted in the middle of an otherwise lovely meadow. At first you keep noticing it, cringing, and you feel constantly on edge. But after a while, the billboard blends into the scenery.

That’s the word “uncertainty,” the billboard in the meadow. It’s a gray area between “normal” life and an emergency state (remember when uncertainty was color coded after 9/11?). It seems we’ve all become adept at navigating within this altered reality, this gray area.?

Shades of Gray

I find this interesting since, in general, we tend to get pretty freaked out by gray areas.?

Even as we settle into what appears to be permanent uncertainty, there seems to be a paradoxical relationship between how we perceive gray areas in other areas of life, return to office (RTO), for instance. The most passionate debaters of RTO seem to keep swaying the conversation to “all office” or “all remote” with no acceptable gray area. More on that in a bit. Even politics, never gray area’s friend has become the most black and white show on earth.?

I personally love the gray area. Writers like me, people who think through their words, self-perceived philosophers and weirdos, introverts, and observers, understand that the best ideas live in the gray area. Uncertainty has always been our reality. Although most of us never expected fiction to slide into nonfiction so seamlessly. Nevertheless, as a longtime resident of the gray area, here are some thoughts on it to help you embrace it better.

Fear of the Unknown

There are no intellectual promises to be found or made here. What’s true one moment can be disproven the next. It’s the proverbial fork in the road with no clearly marked sign as to which way is the right way. It’s A/B testing and neither is the right answer. With the gray area, our brain warns us to proceed with caution.?

It’s not that we fear the unknown, as much as we fear being wrong.?

The gray area is a minefield of being wrong for those who align exclusively with black and white thinking. Embracing the gray area means overcoming the fear of wrongness, and leaving the polarity to batteries where it belongs.?

Black and White Thinking Could Not BE More AI

As we’re seeing with LLMs like ChatGPT and Bard, AIs love black and white thinking, making a firm declaration even when they’re completely wrong (did you hear about the one where ChatGPT insisted multiple times that there’s an “m” in Canada?). The more we embrace gray zone thinking, the better we distinguish ourselves from AI’s. The more comfortably we can sink into nuanced answers, the more we accentuate our humanness and critical thinking. This often requires embracing the discomfort of no definite answers.?

Free Yourself From Ego

Black and white thinking, in an evolutionary sense, seems attached to fear and ego. It’s the belief that if you let go of the “right” end of the spectrum where you’ve set up camp, you’re publicly acknowledging being wrong, being “less than,” and therefore, anthropologically speaking, being downgraded to weaker pack member status. Gotta love those old lizard brain beliefs that keep parts of our brain trapped in prehistoric times!?

Reject Mainstream Screaming

Want to spot black and white thinking? See what people are screaming at each other about online, especially social media. Algorithms reward discourse and there’s no better way to promote discourse than to convince everyone that there are only two sides to an issue.?

Because once people claim ownership of their truth, they will fight to the digital death to defend it. The gray area is nowhere to be found in most online conversations. When the occasional curious observer attempts to raise their hand and represent the gray area, they are quickly shot down and automatically assigned a side. Then everyone feels better.?

Want to embrace the gray area of critical thinking? Spot and explore the points of thought in between the sides of the conversations being debated online. The intellectual outliers.

Wait, Aren’t You a Science…. Person?

Science is a constant exploration of the gray area. It’s a constant testing and retesting of hypotheses where each set of evidence is a different road leading to a different conclusion. Even when those differences appear to be microscopic, a one degree shift in the implementation of an idea can change everything.?

The core of my current grad school studies, statistics is the definition of uncertainty. In stats, there is no 100%. There is, for instance, 95% confidence that the answer you’re looking for probably falls between A and B (the gray area), like goalposts in a football game. We’re saying there’s an X% chance that the football went through the posts - but we can’t be 100% certain. Maybe this is why the refs look across the end zone at each other to check before raising their arms to indicate “it’s good!”. The two refs in the end zone are the confidence intervals stating with 95% certainty that the ball went through the goalposts.?

The gray area of constant questions, hypotheses, theories, testing, interpreting, and analyzing, is my favorite part of science. It scratches my storytelling itch in a major way by reminding me that asking questions like - “But why?” “Why not?” “So what?” “What else?” and “What if this was not true?” leads to some of the best stories ever told.

Asking questions like - “But why?” “Why not?” “So what?” “What else?” and “What if this was not true?” leads to some of the best stories ever told.

If science was a black and white endeavor it would have died out a long time ago. Experiments would only have to be run once, with that particular set of results assumed to be valid for the rest of eternity. The earth would be flat, demons responsible for psychiatric disorders, and the sun would circle the earth.?

Science is the ultimate gray area. Ironically, the most black and white thinking I’ve seen typically occurs not in science, but in business, where it’s somehow more acceptable - even encouraged - to stand by one right way of doing things. Questioning it, or testing it, feels precarious with too many egos and bottom lines at risk for bruising. The bigger and more established the business, the more face there is to lose. “We’ve always done it this way” is a shield against running the experiment again, where it might be discovered that the evidence expired decades ago.?

“Return to the office because I said so” either without any evidence at all or cherry-picked evidence that doesn’t fit the argument is disheartening to watch when the answer most likely falls in the gray area.?

“AI is the best thing that has ever happened” and “AI is always wrong and therefore can never be trusted to do anything” also slams shut a world of exploration and further testing for possibilities and use cases.?

Unlocking the Lab

The gray area is the lab, and unfortunately it feels like many in business would prefer to put a padlock on its door and pretend it doesn’t exist. Not so coincidentally, many of the things organizational leaders and managers are searching for, can be found in the uncertainty of the gray area.

>Improved communication & less miscommunication, including intergenerational.

>The curiosity and creativity to solve problems with different thinking than what caused them.

>New ideas to stay competitive as things continue moving at warp speed.?

I Don’t Know

In closing, here is a quote one of my professors (an esteemed scientist) includes in his email signature:

“I don't mind not knowing. It doesn't scare me.” - Richard Feynman?

It takes courage to say “I don’t know but I’m willing to experiment, explore, fall on my face a few times, and see what emerges.” Let’s start there.