Reality 10: "There will be surprises!"

So there you have it: I promised to tell you about nine assumptions and ten realities. We have considered nine sets of assumptions that make a difference in how we live our lives; nine choices in how we think, which have consequences for what we experience:

1. Stable Growth, or Discontinuous Change
2. Rationality, or Unconscious Reactiveness
3. Competition, or Collaboration
4. Scarcity, or Abundance
5. Abundance, or Ecological Limits
6. Coercion, or Community
7. Information, or Interaction
8. Vertical, or Horizontal Coordination
9. "Someone's in charge," or "Yes—We are!"

There are other sets of assumptions and other topics I plan to explore here, but for now let's pause and consider what this is about: We are attracted to the comfort of certainty, especially in difficult times, and about that which is dear to us. But certainty is elusive, especially about the important questions.

So we make some educated guesses about how things are, and what is likely to happen, and then we choose our behavior accordingly. Years ago, George Kelly wrote brilliantly about this in The Psychology of Personal Constructs. We are all scientists, he told us, continually developing hypotheses and then acting on them. But competent scientists remember that these are hypotheses—best guesses—and that emergent data and experience can be used to confirm, disprove, or modify them. That is the scientific process, and more generally it is the learning process, which helps us to function effectively and happily as human beings.

We get in trouble when we forget that these are assumptions, tentatively held, pending further information. Blind certainty is at the core of much injustice, cruelty, and human folly. But when we follow the discipline of constant inquiry, we have the opportunity to do what we do best as human beings and as a society—we learn, we improve, we develop, and we grow.

What assumptions have you modified lately?