Reducing Uncertainty

"They have no idea” was the expression that caught my attention. The conversation had gone something like this:

"Our son and daughter-in-law are expecting".

“Congratulations, when she due"?

 "She has three months to go".

“Do they know what they're having"?

It was the response to that question which intrigued me.

“No, they have no idea”.

Being the self-effacing person that I am, I didn't offer my perspective. However I had an idea. I was confident the expecting family wouldn’t have a kitten or a turnip; it would likely be a girl or a boy.

Douglas Hubbard in his book How to Measure Anything has defined measurement as the reduction of uncertainty. In many cases the measurement of something does not need to be accurate, it simply needs to reduce uncertainty. For example suppose you are the board chair of the church and you are wondering what the donation income will be by the end of the year. Given the information which you should already have, you will know by the end of March what your donation income will be at the end of December. Find out what the average percentage of all donations received during the past three years was received by the end of March. It is unlikely that being 25% through the year, the church will have received 25% of its donations. Typically the highest giving is in November and December. So if over the past three years the church has received on average 19.4% of what it was going to receive by the end of the year, you have yourself a measurement. You can reduce uncertainty with relative confidence knowing that whatever the donation amount is by the end of March will be 19.4% of what you're going to receive by the end of the year.

This can apply to a weight loss target, retirement portfolio, camper registrations or store sales.

Let me encourage you to identify something today with which you have a significant degree of uncertainty and look at how you can reduce that level of uncertainty.