If you can stand the uncertainty, the right path will emerge.
The tools of intent and action cut through the fog of business.
When trying to define entrepreneurship as the economic force that generates a better and better material world and ultimately makes people feel better about their circumstances and their well-being, the economics profession often talks about how entrepreneurship is “the bearing of uncertainty”.
Let’s try to unpack that expression. It’s an important element of running a business, but its meaning is not necessarily very clear.
It boils down to this: no-one can predict the future. We can’t even put very good odds on it. Our general rule of thumb, the heuristic that gets us through life, is that things go on as they are.
But entrepreneurs - whether they are start-up founders or SME business owners or team members in a bigger firm - think differently. They can imagine a future that is not the same as today. It has new products and services, new and surprising innovations, new comforts, new capabilities, and new companies. Customers are pleased in new ways that they had not anticipated.
If these entrepreneurs are business-oriented, they’ll begin a project to bring that future about. They imagine the outcome first, and then work backwards through all the elements they’ll have to design to get to that new future, all the capital resources they’ll need, all the people they’ll need to help them, and all the partners they’ll need to organize for those parts they can’t do themselves. They’ll have to figure out the cost of all this and compare it to the price that a customer might be willing to pay, and estimate the number of customers who’ll be willing to pay that price, and what percentage of them might be repeat purchasers assuming they enjoy the new experience.
Taking on such a project might sound like a gamble. But that’s not quite the right word. A gambler can calculate their odds. But an entrepreneur can’t. Their outcome is incalculable. But it’s imaginable.
In this way, a successful entrepreneur or entrepreneurial team is not better at gambling - i.e. lucky - but better at imagining. Not just imagining the outcome, but imagining all the way backwards from the outcome to the beginning and the assembly.
This is what the economists call bearing uncertainty: imagining the future and drawing up the plan with no firm guardrails to guide the development.
The term “uncertainty” has a negative ring to it. Entrepreneurs see this situation through a positive lens, as a challenge to navigate a complex task. And they have command of two tools that cut through the complexity: entrepreneurial intent and entrepreneurial action.
Entrepreneurial intent is that commitment to serving others, facilitating better experiences for them, with the understanding that there will be a market-based reward for successfully doing so. Intent is a bit of a mystery in neurology. Where does it come from? How does it originate? Why do some people have entrepreneurial intent and others don’t? We can’t identify the origins of intent, but we can define it for entrepreneurs: the pursuit of new economic value.
The second part of bearing uncertainty is entrepreneurial action. Many of us might have entrepreneurial intent, but not everyone takes entrepreneurial action and persists with that action, making adjustments along the way, until the result (new value) is achieved. So we should think of entrepreneurship not just as a state of mind or an imaginative approach, but as action with the specific intent of creating value. Without action there is no entrepreneurship.
Uncertainty in the context of entrepreneurship is not mental dithering about which path to take. It is the unpredictable result of action. It comes after action, not before. A good metaphor in tech marketing is the A/B test. The uncertainty does not lie in advance, in regard to whether A or B will be preferred. There is certainty in the action of running the test and knowing there will be an outcome.
What happens is that the one-way teleology of intent is stretched into the two-way journey of intentionality. Intent is about setting a course with a specific end in mind, an initial setting of purpose. Intent in entrepreneurship might be seen in the clear, initial goals or missions set by an entrepreneur, like creating a product or entering a new market. It's straightforward and focused on execution.
Intentionality involves how these goals are not just set but are continuously adapted, understood, and modified through action and interaction with the market, customers, and other external factors. It's about the ongoing, dynamic process of aligning mental models with the reality of the business environment, which might include learning from failures (or A/B tests), adapting strategies based on customer feedback, or pivoting business models. Intentionality involves the entrepreneurial journey.
In the book Entrepreneurial Strengthsfinder, Jim Clifton remarks that entrepreneurs have what he calls a special relationship with uncertainty. They embrace it, enjoy it, see opportunity in it, and are energized by it.
A better way to think might be to realize that there is no uncertainty for entrepreneurs. There is intent, and there is action, which stretches out intent into an ongoing intentionality. They seek to create value for others, they take action, they evaluate the results from those actions, make adjustments, and take more action. They accept that the ultimate outcome may be different than they imagined at an earlier point in the journey, and they value the learning that is represented by the gap between imagination and reality. The entrepreneurial life is a string of A/B tests with no preference between A and B.