All of us suffer from the incompleteness of our lives. It isn’t that we make mistakes. It goes deeper than performance. It has a lot to do with our self-awareness. I’m not talking about your five StrengthsFinder strengths or your personality inventory scores. They don’t provide complete self-awareness. We need context to understand ourselves. If your situation is constantly changing, then your perception of who you are is constantly changing. Every one of those situations provides us a context for understanding how we are not complete and capable.
It is hard to admit that this incompleteness is real. Our social relationships demand that we have it all together. Yes, some people will be more together than others. It is still a relative awareness. To accept our incompleteness is to open ourselves up to the possibilities of narrowing the gap.
The Brokenness of Organizations
All organizations are also broken and fragmented in their own way. No matter how hard they try to fulfill a stage of development is never complete. It is like the film director who said, “A movie is never finished, only abandoned.” I find the same to be true in every aspect of my life. Even after I post this column, there is always more editing that could be done.
Incompleteness is the norm. All organizations, societies, and each of us are subject to the state of transition that is incompleteness. To cope well with this reality, we need to develop skills for adapting to incompleteness and change.
The Openness of the World
In the early 1930s, Austrian physicist Kurt Gödel discovered a principle in the field of mathematics that he called the “incompleteness” theory. He found that certain mathematical problems could be solved, but not consistently. His discovery shook the world of mathematics because scientists believed that consistency was “the sole criterion” determining the proof of a mathematical theory. This opinion is true even for us average people who believe consistency is essential.
Gödel’s principle is analogous to what I see in organizations. A business can function well but never with completeness or perfection. Flaws, mistakes, poor execution, and political maneuvering create a negative dynamism that makes progress difficult.
Gödel’s principle also shows that the world before us is always open to new ways of understanding. It means our knowledge is always incomplete, experts’ expertise is partial, and the science is never settled.
I have been wondering as I have thought about this topic. Can there be multiple one-right-way of doing something? Why can the experience of transition be exhilarating and maddeningly chaotic at the same time? Life is not stable or fixed. It isn’t consistent or entirely predictable. Normal is not sameness but change over and over again. No answer to a problem is ever the final answer unless the problem is abandoned. More than ever before the flow of new information means that we are in a constant state of incompleteness. We are playing catch-up every day. And will do so every day for the rest of our lives.
In this sense, incompleteness is the beauty and dynamism of all of life. Hang on it is going to be a wild ride.