does not mean there is no explanation

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“Just because we don’t understand doesn’t mean that the explanation doesn’t exist.”

Madeleine L’Engle

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There are a shitload of things that happen in the world, and to us specifically, of which we will never understand. In fact, the probability of never understanding something is higher than the probability of understanding.

Which leads me to probabilities.

In our minds, the more probable, the more likely there is an explanation. In the good old days, we didn’t speak of probabilities, we would sit down and pragmatically think about the likelihood of shit happening – both good shit and bad shit. And, yeah, most times when probabilities are being discussed these days “crisis” is tossed around and when ‘crisis’ enters the narrative we inevitably seek explanations – relentlessly seek explanations. Let me be clear. Crisis is never good. That said. There is certainly bad crisis, i.e., “the bottom has dropped out from under our feet and we are 5,000 feet up”, but then there is also good crisis, i.e., “holy shit, they loved it and we have an order for a 1,000,000 sock puppets but we only have a 1000 capability sock puppet manufacturing capacity.” Both are certainly a crisis just that one focuses on survivable and the other on thriveable. I share that to suggest explanation importance is relative.

Look. Explanations in Life are tricky things. This is why gamification was/is so appealing. But we know from research that finite progress (milestones, sprints, etc.) are a doom loop of chasing things in which people get trained to chase output instead of outcomes, items instead of impact, explanations instead of learning/understanding. People inherently gain greater satisfaction if they show progress – better today than yesterday, better tomorrow than today – so why don’t more people do so? Well. Progress can be a fuzzy thing with fuzzy explanations. Because of that we emphasize measurement which, unfortunately, heightens discomfort of the alternative; the plausible but not certain, the probabilities of, not the prediction of. The plausible does not usually equate to “is” and it is within the wretched hollow in-between where we become captive to nothingness where no explanations reside. This is where “there must be an explanation” falls. So, we twist ourselves into pretzels turning thoughts of plausibility into images of possibility, then images of probability, ultimately shaping/morph itself into a perception of “is.” We move the uncertainty ball into the certainty space, one explanation at a time, not because we actually believe it will make our lives meaningful, but rather because we fear the absence of certainty. Second is that, well, absence of a pursuit of explanations, you worry you may actually end up with nothing and knowing nothing about why you have nothing. Yeah. The truth is while business and society use “somethings” to make us captive of what are actually ‘nothings’, nothing is personal. What I mean by that is even though we may not view the world in a zero-sum way we fear having nothing at the end of the race. We show up to our meeting with Death with no explanation for what we did in our Life. Please note I am suggesting even in death we will reflect more on our ‘doings’ than on impact. That means we become a captive to a fear of nothing explained so we jump onboard the ‘something train’ and hope even if we don’t do anything meaningful (however that could actually be assessed) we will have something; rather than nothing. We make all of our ‘somethings’ explainable. Ponder.

Which leads me to end with an important reminder.

Preciseness, and rationalizing, explanations are mediated truths which deprive us of the ambiguity which is the engine of imagination. The enemy of imagination, and imagination revolutionaries, is certainly pragmatism, finiteness, and rationalization, uhm, explaining and explanations. To be clear, I tend to agree with “doesn’t mean an explanation doesn’t exist,” it’s just that our pursuit of ‘an’ explanation is reductionary rationalization rather than expansive imagination. Imagination has become ‘something to do,’ i.e., a pragmatic thing to do with a pragmatic objective. Imagination has been replaced by innovation pipelines, blue sky thinking workshops, and any number of constructed tasks to be deployed with a specific objective in mind. Everything. Imagination must be ‘explained.’ They become singular expressions of imaginative imagination when imagination should be embodied within an infinite thought and the pursuit of infiniteness. Yeah. Sometimes unexplained. Yeah. That’s a problem in today’s milestone/KPI/achievement obsessed world, but the essence of the imagination is located precisely in its improbability and imprecise explanations. In a probabilistic, finite-driven, rationalizing, world that is a challenge. That is why we need imagination revolutionaries who hold imagination high as the idea, and ideal, around which an imagination revolution can occur and a better future can not only be envisioned, but constructed. We need imagination revolutionaries who can embrace the idea that what we do not understand may have explanations, but those explanations will be beautiful, and plausible, in their impreciseness. Yeah. The power actually lies in the lack of definition. Ponder.