ESCALATION IN UNCERTAINTY

"When do I cut people off? When do I support wars? When do I fire people?" 🦅🕊️ The ESCALATION IN UNCERTAINTY Principle feat. hawks and doves

We cannot always be the hawk 🦅

We cannot always be the dove 🕊️

In a world with uncertainty, and a world with uncertainty about other people's motivations, escalating to maximum risk at the very first disagreement is a terrible strategy.

A much better strategy would be to at least postpone such escalation to the second disagreement. And better than that would be to postpone to the third.

This unofficial Escalation in Uncertainty Principle also applies to wars.

...friendships, relationships,

...and organizational leadership.

It's based on the interesting field of Game Theory. If you're thinking now that game theory must be about winning, I'll share a cool spontaneous quote of mine from one of my first job interviews, when my personality test came out low on competitiveness:

"It's about winning together. All of us."

The test questions were dumb.

I got the job.

Anyway...

Let's do an example where you're the leader in an organization, and you're solving a task with an employee.

Sometimes the employee may act in a way that you see as unreasonably unfair towards you. But the actions are often ambigious. Was the employee being unreasonable, or even out to get you? Or was it merely a move they did for some other strategy? Were you smart when you hired an employee who sees a longterm strategic need that you don't see right now? Or did they react to something you did which you didn't realize they may have been upset about?

Can you imagine how that might escalate into a whirl of not strategic and not mutually beneficial societal / organizational / relational mess?

So essentially it's the age old story over again that our parents probably/maybe tried to teach us:

Communicate

&

Learn to spot uncertainty ✨

&

Postpone escalation in uncertainty

We cannot always be the hawk 🦅

We cannot always be the dove 🕊️

🦅🕊️🦅🕊️🦅🕊️🦅🕊️🦅🕊️

The Escalation in Uncertainty Principle