The Art of Negative Capability
Making peace with uncertainty
A visionary can find his way by moonlight and see the dawn before the rest of the world. Oscar Wilde
In my last post, I wrote how our ability to bounce back depends on how we navigate interruptions and deal with surprises like this pandemic which is so implausible that it seems incomprehensible.
Poets can show us how to respond to uncertainty. John Keats, the great Romantic poet, believed in negative capability;
It is a state of being content, not fully knowing what's going on and yet fully receptive to the world around us. It is about being comfortable not needing to find a rational explanation for everything that happens. It is about not trying to fit everything in neat familiar categories to create an illusion that nothing has changed.
Negative Capability
John Keats first spoke about negative capability when writing to his brothers, George and Thomas, in 1817 to describe his approach to life.
Negative Capability, that is when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.
According to Keats, who died very young at 25, negative capability is an indispensable quality for flexibility and openness to the world. Keats was also a student of medicine and chemistry and drew inspiration for the word 'negative' from the recent discovery of electricity.
Just as the negative pole receives the current of electricity from the positive pole, so the poet receives impulses from the world around him, a world that is full of mysteries and doubts that the poet cannot explain, but which in his 'open' state of receptivity he does not feel the need to explain.
Cultivating Negative Capability
The least questioned assumptions are often the most questionable. Paul Broca.
While developing negative capability is a lifelong quest, I believe we can begin our journey by questioning our assumptions and being willing to think differently.
To do so, Gillian Tett reminds us,
We need to make the 'strange familiar' and the 'familiar strange' and take in a worm's- eye view by paying close attention to the world around us.
We also need to 'make sense' by creating better explanations to answer the question what's going on? So that people take us seriously enough to ask ‘what we do next?
Making the 'Strange' Familiar
WFH is an excellent example of making the mistake of ignoring ideas that we take for granted. WFH was a strange idea, but the benefits of WFH are so evident that Goldmann Sach and JP Morgan risk losing talent as they go back to a five day work week.
One of the questions leaders have on their minds when they speak to me is transitioning smoothly to a WFH or a hybrid work environment. There are no manuals, and everyone is making things up as they go along.
A CEO of a large power utility told me the more he tries to make sense, the more he realizes how strange things are- what does he do with the ten admin assistants who no longer have a role? How does he motivate employees whom he suspects are far too comfortable working from home? Will flexibility in terms of remote working be a 'table stakes' for recruiting talent.? His unease stems from taking decisions while not fully knowing the consequences.
Making the 'strange' familiar is to go beyond what one usually thinks about doing. For example, how willing and prepared are organizations to do more intensive local studies on WFH by spending time in employees' homes, asking open questions, and thinking about what employees are not talking about. Katerina Berg, CHRO of Spotify, has spent the last 15 months listening, having a dialogue with employees to understand better how to adapt to the new world.
This worm's-eye view may be more revealing than an impersonal bird’s eye view, based on an analysis of online surveys and collating existing data.
Making the 'Familiar' Strange.
It's difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.Upton Sinclair
It is never easy for us to peer back at ourselves or view our world objectively. Cultivating negative capability is to take a hard look at ourselves to discover what we are missing in our familiar landscape.
It isn't easy, but this approach can be rewarding, as Gillian Tett discovered in 2006. Something was amiss in her familiar world of the city of London, the financial nerve centre of the world. No one was paying attention to the fast-expanding world of derivatives, replete with acronyms like CDO(collateralized debt obligation) or CDS( credit default swaps) because it was complex and dull. None of the financiers knew what was going on or had assessed the risks; they only knew parts of the puzzle. The bankers were busy making money hand over fist, and that was all that mattered.
Gillian Tett, award-winning FT journalist and former anthropologist, applied the skills she acquired studying the marriage rituals of Tajikistan- lateral vision, asking open questions, assuming nothing- to make the familiar strange. Through a series of sharp, critical articles, she exposed what was going on and effectively predicted the financial crisis of 2007-2008.
When it comes to WFH, leaders can lead the way by making the familiar world of the office strange; by taking a hard look at what it means to go to the office because the pandemic has changed that meaning for people.
According to Cal Henderson, co-founder and CTO of Slack, in the' strange' world of hybrid work, most people will want to collaborate, socialize, ideate, find their own space in the office and continue to do most of their work. At home.'
Making Sense
Sensemaking Is about searching for a plausible explanation rather than a definite solution. It's about sharing that explanation widely with all stakeholders to make sense to as many people as possible. This ability allows people to be more comfortable to think differently and act.
The hybrid workplace or WFA (Work From Home) are not solutions but plausible explanations that will keep changing over time as people continue to make sense of what's going on and feel comfortable asking, "Now, what do I do next?" and moving forward.
The art of negative capability is about making sense in an uncertain world by searching for plausible explanations and not solutions, by making the strange familiar and the familiar strange.
Negative capability is about embracing uncertainty, living with mystery and making peace with ambiguity.