But in fact, with innovation work, Uncertainty is essential.

If you're doing innovation work, or you're leading it, or you're managing it, you must understand what parts of the problem you are uncertain about. You must talk about it with the people that you report to and the people that report to you.

And the biggest problem with doing that is that you're afraid.

4) Uncertainty work is innovation work. Uncertainty work is Climate Restoration work. Uncertainty work is Regenerate the ecosystem work.

5) In climate change work it is very unlikely that a single action will be the one dominant solution that will solve all of our problems.

It’s almost a certainty that it will be many, many, many actions, some big, most of them very small, all of them working simultaneously. Because that is how complex systems work. And this is how complex systems change.

6) Knowing how to distinguish different types of Uncertainty is vital.

7) We need to be able to talk about whether or not we value things like present enjoyment more than the enjoyment of future people that don’t exist yet. That is where not knowing value comes from.

Value requires us to be philosophical about whether or not outcomes are valuable or not.

We rarely ask ourselves this question: but in the context of climate change, we need to ask that because there is a trade off between economic activity and the economic vibrance of the present world that we live in and the sustainability of that kind of economic life activity into the future.

There will be a trade off between whether or not in the present day we get to fly around the world on holidays or living in big air conditioned houses. We have to trade that off against the fact that it is throwing CO2 into the air, it’s going to reduce some of the resources that will be available in the future.

8) The Problems and the Solutions in Innovation Work

The Problems

The problem for organizations trying to innovate is that they don't recognize and don't admit to themselves that innovation work is Uncertainty work. And Uncertainty work is inherently uncomfortable.

People are afraid of Uncertainty.

People hate Uncertainty.

They try to minimize it, avoid it, and not talk about it.

But the truth is: Uncertainty is a feature of innovation, not a bug.

Organizations don't recognize the benefits of Uncertainty because they have an evolved instinctive emotional discomfort with Uncertainty. They are afraid of doing the Uncertainty work because it involves failure.

But the truth is, you have to fail in order to succeed with innovation.

Failure and Uncertainty are necessary AND uncomfortable.

The biggest obstacles to innovation work are:

> Fear of failure

> Fear of uncertainty

> Fear of discomfort

Those are the problems or obstacles you have to overcome in innovation work.

The Solutions

What are some solutions?

There are no guaranteed solutions. But here are two suggestions which Vaughn has seen work.

First of all, people involved in innovation work need to become more comfortable with being uncomfortable when they're doing the kind of work that involves “Generative Uncertainty.”

Humans have an evolved an aversion to uncertainty.

Productive discomfort is the ability to be uncomfortable while doing something that is Generatively Uncertain.

Productive discomfort is a skill you can build. You can train yourself and your team to get over the aversion to Uncertainty.

The way to do that is to do the cognitive-emotional equivalent of “progressive loaded weight training.”

With progressive loading you start small with something you can do. And then you exceed your maximum limit a little bit. And then you rest and recover. You go up and up and up again, progressively. You're progressively loading yourself a little bit beyond your current capacity.

Progressive loading is a way of becoming better at dealing with the discomfort of facing and trying to create some Generative Uncertainty.

The idea is to initially expose yourself to very small, very manageable situations, which are designed to be Generatively Uncertain, designed to put you into a situation where you don't know about something or you don't know what's going to happen next. But that situation of Uncertainty is designed to help expose you to something which is a new experience that helps you grow and gives you a different perspective.

Doing things that make you feel a little bit uncomfortable and over time, doing things that become more and more uncomfortable result in you becoming very good in the end at doing very uncomfortable things.

Vaughn has built a tool called “idk” for that.

idk is a tool to help you develop and scale the ability to have an Uncertainty Mindset. It helps you build the ability to become productively uncomfortable.

The second solution is Sneaky Strategy

A Sneaky Strategy is basically a strategy that tries to hide what you're doing from the organizational antibodies (the gatekeepers) that will kill the idea, until you have validated it enough that those antibodies are no longer powerful enough to kill it.