Seth's Blog: The Billion-Dollar T-Shirt

Ontological uncertainty exists when, even if you perfectly know and understand the environment you're in, you still can't predict the impact of your actions because the system is changing faster than the ripple effects of your actions can play out.  This is the situation Seth Godin faced when, back in 1993-94, he wrote a book instead of launching an Internet thing-y (like a search engine) and subsequently suffered an opportunity cost of a $1 Billion or so.  (Hey, there's a lot of us in that club. :-)  ) 

What really would've happened is anyone's guess, of course, but it's a nice parable that provides a framework for understanding some things that can constrain us, and also has got me noodling on how best to think about rates of change in different contexts. 

Technorati tags: change, complexity science, systems thinking, ontological uncertainty