Life in non-linear
Back in February, Sally Stenning wrote a post called Who are we and what are we doing here?. In our short Medium lives, it ranks as one of our most popular pieces, praised for Sally’s willingness to say we don’t know precisely what we are doing, but we are letting our values and a rough structure guide us. We call it believing in non-linear (or non-lineal if you’re Millzfdi) outcomes.
I think this phrase first landed in my vocabulary after reading a Harvard Business Review article on how often we miss non-linear relationships in business (and life?). It states:
Decades of research in cognitive psychology show that the human mind struggles to understand nonlinear relationships. Our brain wants to make simple straight lines.
It calls to mind another topic that always fascinates me (despite my knowing precious little about it): complex systems. Things like weather and traffic, where it’s really hard to predict things because of all the different factors involved. Wikipedia’s more formal, never wrong definition says:
Complex systems are systems whose behaviour is intrinsically difficult to model due to the dependencies, relationships, or interactions between their parts or between a given system and its environment.
If you go all the way down the complex system mole hole, you end up in chaos theory, a.k.a. the butterfly effect. Things get weird fast and suddenly wings flapping over here leads to tsunamis over there. Or something like that (again, my interest far surpasses my knowledge).
Okay, so there are many complex systems out there AND our brains desperately want to make simple, straight-line relationships. Eeesh! It’s a recipe for people overthinking, being overconfident, and/or making up total nonsense.
So at Adventure, we say let’s fast forward through the pre/post-rationalisation process and accept that there are some things we can’t explain properly. There are, of course, an infinite number of things we (or people smarter than us) can explain. And we love learning about those things (#learntogether #ustwovalues).
We also love to take a step back, embrace that feeling when something just feels right, and JFDI. This gets back to what Sally wrote. Three months later, said another way, I believe the Adventure ethos is
Strong Values + Decent Human Beings = Can’t Lose.
I’d love to revisit this theme within each of the parts of Adventure (investing, co-working, philanthropy and venturing). But, the non-linear nature of Adventure suggests that may never happen so I’m off the hook if I don’t.
Email me on justinm@ustwo.com if you want to get in touch and go non-linear with us.
