Managing uncertainity

Some random thoughts are crossing my mind, which I am sure are nothing new to anyone, but none the less I will put them here.

There are few not so good things which can't be eliminated. The best way to manage them is to accept and deal with them. One such thing is 'uncertainity'. Come to think of it, for a business, managing uncertainity is one of the biggest cost drivers. Businesses come up with several ways to secure whatever amount of certainity they could. And this comes at a price. We see such examples in our every day life. The cheap flight tickets when booked months in advance, the early bird tickets for concerts, group bookings, long term contracts with utility service providers, etc are all an attempt to garner some certainity. There is whole world in financial domain to manage this uncertainity, which can't be even touched in this post.

In today's intense competitive scenario, many times, how well a firm can manage its certainity, defines it success. It is in this thinking lies the intrinsic risk of things going wrong. An overzealous business might think of totally doing away with this uncertainity. This can prove disastrous. How ever one might wish, 'uncertainity' can never be eliminated. There are numerous such analogies. For example in manufacturing, for a process whenever there is a variation from desired, an analysis is done to find out if it is chance variation or assignable variation. Nothing is done to eliminate the chance variation, it is only assignable variation which is eliminated. This is true for all kinds of uncertainity.

Not surprisingly all those organisations that have this uncanny ability to estimate future and manage the uncertainity are the ones which stand out and stay forever.