Margaret Wheatley

Comfortable with Uncertainty
August 15-19

"The whole globe is shook up, so what are you going to do when things are falling apart? You're either going to become more fundamentalist and try to hold things together, or you're going to forsake the old ambitions and goals and live life as an experiment, making it up as you go along." Pema Chödrön

Our current challenge-as individuals, citizens and leaders -- isn't the rapid pace of change. It's uncertainty -- not knowing what's next, what works, or where things are heading. As one Healthcare executive commented about the future of her industry: "We don't know what we'll be doing, or who we'll be doing it with, or where we'll be doing it, or how we'll be doing it. But we do know that we'll be doing something."

Few of us have been prepared to deal with this level of groundlessness. We learned the skills of certainty: we know how to set goals, create strategies, develop complex plans. We've been told that we can make the world work according to plan if we have clear intentions, a strong will, and good leadership skills.

Now, these very skills create obstacles to our effectiveness. Our task now is to learn how to deal with uncertainty, not as a temporary state, but as a condition of life. How do we maintain our clarity, focus and stamina as we move with life's changing rhythms and directions? How do we avoid holding on to old patterns and behaviors that no longer serve? How do we find ground when the rug keeps getting pulled out from under us? And, most importantly, how do we make a meaningful contribution in the midst of so much chaos and instability?

If we choose to be leaders for this time, if we desire to serve and contribute, and help others navigate through turbulence, we need a different set of skills and practices as leaders, including:

• Dealing with strong emotions, such as anger, despair, fear, loss.
• Recognizing familiar patterns, getting unstuck
• Admitting when we're lost
• Discerning the complexity of interactions
• Inventing, making it up as we go along
• Knowing self

"We're lost, but we're making good time." Yogi Berra

Each of these topics will focus on both organizational and personal competencies: