The power of knowns and unknowns

Working from knowns and unknowns keep us focused and adaptive.

For knowns: what's known, clear, true? For unknowns: what's unknown, unclear, assumed? We can also access knowns and unknowns by considering: what's our sense of things, what's our expectations, what are we hearing?

The psychology of momentum

We get momentum on any venture for one reason. We’re ready. As soon we are actually ready to do something, we do it. Readiness in part is the moment when nothing holds us back from simply taking the next step forward.

So we create more momentum with the questions:

What are we ready for?

Could anything make us more ready for anything?

Constraints and possibilities

When we work on our interests from knowns and unknowns, it becomes clear that our knowns are our constraints. They are the givens within which we have to work, our boundary conditions.

Our unknowns are our possibilities. They are the edges of exploring and experimenting that lead to new discoveries and options.

This explains why we see such diverse productivity from equally talented and motivated groups. It's all about whether they're working predominantly from their knowns or from knowns and unknowns.

Start with knowns

When we work on any interest, it's useful to start with our knowns before beginning our unknowns that lead to our questions.

What is clear at this point? What do we have evidence for? What do we know for sure? What seems certain? What do we know as true that we guess will continue to be true, and for how long do we guess it would continue to be true? What could be indicators that it is no longer being true?

This creates optimum conditions for our questions.

The unique timeless power of interests

By definition interests have no end points. In contrast to goals, they are not achieved or accomplished. They are expandable and adaptable. We can adapt and expand their intentions, forms and tempo.

If we have interest in running our business better, there could be no end point to the exploration and experiments we can engage in, one question at a time.

Making it interesting

One of the simplest ways to identify our interests is with the question: What would be interesting? It unleashes all kinds of imaginative possibilities. This question taps into our eagerness for exploration and discovery.

Everyday progress instead of everyday failure

When we have a goal, every day we aren't achieving it, we are failing. If we fall short by even a bit, we consider it a fail.

When our interest is progress in a specific direction, everyday is a win. Everyday is success because we can make progress on a daily basis as long as we define what progress is. If we want to accelerate momentum, we can adjust resources or definitions of progress.

Shifting interests

As long as our interests generate new learning, discoveries and realities, they will shift in look, feel and function. They grow and evolve. They spark new flows of interest and accelerate ones in progress. They become richer, more nuanced and refined. They become more focused, inclusive and expansive.

Interest to action

Reality is, we do act on our interests. Interests can inspire, generate and organize as much action as anything we would label a goal, commitment or intention. I would argue that interests have an actionable advantage because they work from questions. Nothing has more power to energize and engage our best selves as compelling questions that matter.

How beliefs factor into exploring

Part of our human nature is to hold beliefs as the ultimate indicators of truth. This creates a tendency to disregard or question any facts to the contrary. We believe what we want to believe, which in many cases is what we have always believed. This is the legitimacy of familiarity.

One way to escape this is by translating beliefs as assumptions into questions. As soon as we have a question, our mind becomes interested rather than certain. And in interest, new things become possible.

The interest-burden distinction

Our interests are evident in how we feel about them. Our interests are things we feel excited and eager to explore. They are questions that inspire and engage us.

The contrasts are burdens, things that are oppressive, worrisome or endurable. They are barriers, constraints and challenges we want to relieve ourselves of.

With a refraining of meaning, burdens can become interests.

Vision, values and dreams

What we call vision, values and dreams are really interests. They are things we’re interested in exploring and pursuing. They generate questions that move us in the direction of what we want to see possible.

We can sequence them in the order we want to explore and pursue them. We can time frame them so we can approach them logically.

Working from our knowns

The temptation in any kind of planning or working toward goals is to work from what we know. Knowns are the territories of comfort zones, the familiar. One response to uncertainty is to focus on our knowns and work from them.

Working from our knowns is good when we can and/or want to repeat history. It’s not a viable strategy when we want to make something new to happen. This takes working from our unknowns, translated into the forms of our questions. New possibilities live in the land of the unknown.

Reimagining our relationship to uncertainty

The distinctions of uncertainty are many:

Things that are unclear, unresearched, unconfirmed

Things that are unpredictable, variable, changeable

Things that are untried, untested

At the core of each category and example is the abundance of known unknowns (things we know we don't know) and unknown unknowns (things we don't know we don't know). When we engage unknowns as assets, we gain new knowns and new unknowns. The continous emergence of new unknowns is the pathway to experiencing what most interests us.

Working from our questions

What does it mean to work on a question?

For research questions it can mean interviewing people, doing searches, assessing data and reports, observing and making sense of seemingly chaotic patterns.

For experiment questions, it can mean designing and testing something, using learning from tests to modify designs and changing test contexts, conditions and scopes.

For launching questions, it can mean implementing something, getting something started, making something happen.

For growth questions, it can mean adding, modifying or simplifying the features of something, scaling or spreading it.

Learning our way into the future

In an interesting life, we learn our way into the future we want to see.

It is in contrast to planning. Planning is doing what we know about what we know. It is known centric. Learning unleashes the power of the unknowns. We learn our way into the future through question based research and experimenting.

Question based learning accelerates action and experience.

Timing our questions

Timing is everything. Once we identify our research, experiment, launch and growth questions, it's all about making the right things happen at the right time.

This means timing each question in four timeframes:

2 years - 2 decades

2 quarters - 2 years

2 months - 2 quarters

2 weeks - 2 months

As we progress, the timing of questions will shift and new questions will emerge that need to be well timed. The timing of each relates to when we will begin work on that question. There are too many unknowns to determine completion timeframes.