2/8/2025 ☼ not-knowing ☼ uncertainty ☼ risk ☼ strategy
At base, I’ve been interested in the strategy implications of partial knowledge since 2008. Back then, I was investigating how people and organisations change when they explicitly embody the Knightian distinction between uncertainty and risk. That research turned into my first book, on how organisations structure themselves differently, innovate more effectively, and work better when they have an uncertainty mindset.
In writing that book, I realised that Knight’s framing of uncertainty is accurate but incomplete. So, since 2018, I’ve been developing a framework for thinking about what I currently call not-knowing. Not-knowing includes conventional ideas of risk and uncertainty, but also covers other forms of partial or ambiguous knowledge that conventional frameworks miss. Understanding these different types of non-risk not-knowing is critical for making better decisions in a world increasingly shaped by the unknown.
Not-knowing is any situation where our knowledge is partial, unclear, or fundamentally incomplete — where we don’t fully understand what is happening, what will happen, how things connect causally, or how valuable outcomes are.
Not-knowing is a more ramified concept than the more-familiar ideas of formal risk (where probabilities are known accurately and precisely) or Knightian uncertainty (where probabilities are unknown and unquantifiable for a wide range of possible reasons). We encounter many different types of not-knowing in daily practice.
Navigating not-knowing requires an appropriate mindset — a set of assumptions and mental habits that shape what we notice, how we interpret information, and how we decide to act.
Since words shape thought, the language we use to describe different types of not-knowing is crucial. Being precise about what kind of not-knowing we face helps us diagnose it correctly and thus respond effectively.
Many (frankly, most) people and organisations default to what I call a risk mindset, which assumes that all unknowns are quantifiable risks with measurable probabilities. This mindset treats situations as if the full set of possible actions, outcomes, and their causal probabilities are known or knowable.
This approach creates problems. For example:
I’ve written elsewhere about how to think more clearly about risk. When we act on truly uncertain situations as if all the unknowns we face are formal risks, it causes a mindset mismatch. We end up applying inappropriate tools and mental models to uncertain situations, resulting in poor decisions and bad outcomes. Organisations tend to reinforce this because incentives reward neat, quantifiable analysis over messy-looking grapplings with uncertainty and ambiguity.
Two related problems in language worsen the dysfunctional risk mindset:
Humans have a deep, visceral need for certainty, which is why not-knowing feels so hard. These language errors are coping mechanisms to mask the “terror of the unknown” by creating the illusion that what is unknown is controllable. This only works temporarily.
Instead, I advocate for an appropriate mindset for not-knowing — one that explicitly distinguishes between different types of incomplete knowledge and uses clear, unambiguous language to describe them. This mindset allows us to:
This mindset extends and clarifies what I’d previously defined as an uncertainty mindset by providing a more nuanced understanding of different types of not-knowing that aren’t risky.
Through my research and practice, I’ve identified four main types of non-risk not-knowing:
To work effectively with not-knowing we need a toolkit structured around an appropriate mindset for not-knowing and broad approaches to action consistent with that mindset.
A toolkit for not-knowing would have four compartments:
Using tools with clear intent is essential since the same tool can serve different purposes and produce different outcomes based on how it is used.
Thinking clearly about not-knowing opens a path toward innovation, curiosity, freedom, and practical effectiveness. It moves us beyond unrealistic certainty toward an adaptable realism, helping decision-makers navigate a world where incomplete knowledge and constant change are the norm.
For the last few years, I’ve been wrestling with the practical challenges of meaning-making in our increasingly AI-saturated world, developing frameworks for how humans can work effectively alongside these powerful tools while preserving the meaning-making work that is the irreplaceably human part of the reasoning we do. I’ve published this as a short series of essays on meaning-making as a valuable but overlooked lens for understanding and using AI tools
I’ve also been working on turning discomfort into something productive. idk is the first of these tools for productive discomfort.
And I’ve spent the last 15 years investigating how organisations can succeed in uncertain times. The Uncertainty Mindset is my book about how to design organisations that thrive in uncertainty and can clearly distinguish it from risk.