Coherence: the Risk of 'Making Sense' in an Uncertain World

I See It; I Understand It.

We humans love to make sense of things. We’re programmed for it, we look, we see confusion, we might feel puzzled, we look again, we see a pattern. Phew relief. The world makes sense!

Or does it…?

As Daniel Kahneman says,

Our comforting conviction that the world makes sense rests on a secure foundation: our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance.

It seems that our need for the world (however small we define the word ‘world’) to make sense, is stronger than our willingness to sit in the unknown, to appreciate paradox, to know that there is so much that can’t be known and that anything we think makes sense is likely to shift, perhaps within minutes, perhaps within hours, perhaps within months, or even millennia.

Desire and Humility

This tendency is everywhere, of course, but I was particularly conscious of it recently as an organisation I work with is going through a funding crisis.

I asked one of their leadership team a few weeks ago, while new strategies were being developed,

How attached are you to this organisation surviving beyond the period of the strategy you’re working on?

She looked at me as if the question didn’t make sense, it didn’t of course, because so many of our working assumptions are not at the front of our mind, and then she laughed. She got it.

Of course, it’s perfectly understandable to create a vision, to work on strategy, to develop plans, and it’s a seeming paradox that we can do that while also being aware that we are making assumptions, attaching our future well-being to something that might not come to pass.

I’ll quote Kahnemann again,

This is the essence of intuitive heuristics: when faced with a difficult question, we often answer an easier one instead, usually without noticing the substitution.

I love this quote because, while you and I may not notice the substitution, it’s the job of a coach to do exactly that. 

Yes to notice the questions but, much, much, more importantly, to tune you into the fact you are, innocently, making substitutions and assumptions, and helping you spot them and helping you understand what’s really going on in your head.

Don’t Rush to Answer

And, in the words of Rilke, maybe we can let ourselves sit with the questions a bit longer?

I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear sir,
to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart
and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue.
Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them.
And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now.
Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.

My experience tells me that a little humility about all the things we don’t know, and at least a vaguely conscious awareness of the questions we are answering, and those we are not, creates wiser strategies than innocently ignoring our ignorance.

And, who knows, I could be wrong ;-)).

With love,

Cathy