Solving for uncertainty

A really good post from Chris Mowles that talks about how we seek to outsource our discomfort with uncertainty to an algorithm or a method or a process. Why is it so scary that unexpected things might happen when we get together to try and achieve something, unless we have things all planned out? Where is the room for the spontaneous, the novel and the eccentric? Two contrasting recent events have made me think about the technologies that we apply to meeting together, that aspire to create what my late colleague Doug Griffin used to refer to as the doubling of process: feeling that we need a process in order to have a process. The aim is often to make meetings more ‘effective and efficient’, to make maximum use of our precious time together, but perhaps also to render them friction-free and more predictable. For me this is the same kind of instrumentalised thinking that informs AI. I agree with him wholeheartedly. This is an important challenge to practitioners who find themselves…