Beyond the certain, highly probable, and probable, we enter a complex and chaotic future. Based on the trends we’ve seen over the last weeks, we have a sense of where the S&P 500 will be tomorrow. But forecasting 6 months ahead is highly uncertain, especially in volatile markets. Still, 7 months from now, the situation that looks so uncertain today will have returned, in retrospect, to certainty.

We make sense of uncertainty by constructing mental maps which define our interests, desires, strengths, and weaknesses. Casually or formally, we generate scenarios of possibility— usually highly influenced by the kinds of results we expect to see. Often, we construct our maps without notice. We recognize successful former patterns in the events we see; and base our plans on our skill at imposing what has worked before upon what comes next. We bridge uncertainty through learned inattentions and shortcuts; and convince ourselves that we have tamed its dangers.

A discussion with a client provides an example. She still had her job when she had explained to me that her career path had taken her to the height of her profession.  “No”, she said. She was not interested in considering how her work skills might be employed more productively— how her future might be determined more by her than by market forces.  She was certain.

Some months later, after her lay-off, she presented with a new  dilemma. Quite rationally, she explained the corporation’s reasoning: her salary and benefits had been too high; and younger colleagues, while not at her level, understood enough to maintain the division as a going concern. She had decided to begin a consultancy; but it was not going well. She believed that the envy of her former employees prevented them from hiring her. Yet again, she had rejected uncertainty for certainty: her consulting venture had been designed to fail. However, it had two plusses: it allowed her to speak her anger and frustration at her unemployment; and it demonstrated that she had “tried”; she was now resolved to wait for a new corporate opening.

These examples of unproductive certainty reflect a turning from reality. Our second discussion examined working knowledge. My client’s clarity about her former subordinates’ envy was striking. It was clear that the business planning for her consultancy was based on her own disregard for her working knowledge. Their envy was not simply a hunch: she had worked together with them as a team and had recognized it for a long time.

Then why base a business on such a failing proposition?  Her certainty here was of failure. It mirrored her real despair in the crashing and burning of a lifetime’s work. And it was only from examining her new working assumptions relative to her working knowledge that this emotional blockage emerged. She had needed someone to blame; and her business idea had simply recycled the worst part of a team dynamic she knew. Its yield? 100% productivity in blaming; 0 business productivity. In one sense it had completely eliminated uncertainty. In another, left the future completely at risk.

The time has come for invention and innovation: especially if you’re over 50!

The Working Knowledge Initiative approaches entrepreneurship under a very different mindset: that the assets and capabilities of productive work-lives represent a storehouse of entrepreneurial potential;  but that the mid-life professional is reluctant to begin the entrepreneurial journey. As a hiring manager recently told me, “given a 35 year old and a 45 year old with the same skill-set, well… let’s just say the younger guy still has that ‘fire in his belly’.”

The hiring manager’s stereotype applies to conventional entrepreneurial programs as well: its attendees begin with fire in their bellies, motivated by their desire to transform dreams to realities.  Whether experientially rich or poor, their passion is a powerful engine — motoring over adversity and pushing forward toward success.

Mid-life entrepreneurship is an entirely different situation. The excitement remains— though the physical belly-fire has morphed to a more cognitive kind of wisdom. Both success and loss over the life course ( with familial responsibilities added, as well as diminishing retirement savings….) both temper impulsivity and add their measures of anxiety.

Mid-life entrepreneurship must begin in solid refusals: NO, THIS IS NOT WHO I AM. NO, I KNOW NOTHING ABOUT THE SKILLS AND PRACTICES OF NEW BUSINESS FORMATION. NO, I ONLY KNOW MY OWN FIELD. NO, I SHALL WAIT FOR A SUITABLE POSITION TO OPEN UP—EVEN IF I MUST HIDE MY FORMER JOB RESPONSIBILITES AND SALARY LEVEL TO OBTAIN IT.

Mid-life entrepreneurship begins in fear. This is the entry-point of reluctant entrepreneurship.

The Working Knowledge Initiative addresses the psychological situation of the reluctant entrepreneur while building entrepreneurial resiliency through recognitions that work-experience has provided the fundamental building blocks of entrepreneurial success.

Our mindfulness —of the reluctance of the reluctant entrepreneur—and on the needs necessary to bridge the gap between anxiety and successful revenue streams— is the Working Knowledge Initiative’s difference.

On reflection, what she’d left out was reciprocity. The only way that community works is by reciprocity: individuals support the commons from which they derive benefit. Categorical refusal to “use” the commons– to stand apart as if community were somehow disengaged from its utility to its members—is counter-productive. Were all members to avoid the benefits of communal membership, the very idea of their “common”  link would fall apart.

My client was fixed on the hurtful potential of exploitation: of deceitful, one-sided gain rather than its more general productive  meaning  “making use” of a resource. This utilization means that the entrepreneur makes use of a very specific situation— the focal “need” which solves the customer’s situational dilemma— whether for a product or service.

Successful entrepreneurship is about productive, living use of the commons. Indeed, the success of this reciprocity is not decided by the entrepreneur herself, but judged by what the commons requires and how well that requirement is satisfied by the entrepreneur.

The Working Knowledge that individuals think they recognize as successful are practical “hard” skills: concrete activities such as writing, editing, networking, selling, marketing, and researching. However, as others listen to the accomplishments of a lifetime, what emerges is a softer side.

What others hear in the same stories are such ideas as: creativity, ability, knowledge, capability, flexibility, risk, and perseverance. What others enable us to hear in what we are proudest of, needs to be internalized and held dear. We need to write it in bold colors across our bathroom mirrors, as we look at ourselves each morning.

Others have the capability of teaching us that our human dimensions, above and beyond the job-specific tasks we’re accustomed to portraying on our resumes, are the starting point for recognizing what we genuinely know in what we do: and our starting point for stretching beyond our comfort zones through exercise of those “soft skills”, to new beginnings.

Getting back to the main point: what does it say about us, that the skills we see in ourselves lead us to limitation? And that, generally uninvolved with telling our stories to others, we never get to value the genuinely transferable abilities gained during our working lives?

Thinking about it, I started to chuckle. I recalled it exactly. It had been about 40 years ago— and the first time I’d travelled outside the United States. I had been investigating the foreign experience of something familiar– a grocery store— when I came upon a shelf of empty, blue, plastic egg containers, each with compartments for a half-dozen eggs. Coming from a place where eggs grew naturally in segmented cardboard containers of 12, I was curious about this non-domestic experience. I sought out the (non-refrigerated!) egg section and found them piled– about 10 layers deep– in layers of about 3 dozen; and realized immediately that the plastic boxes were conveniences for transporting these loosely-bound eggs from store to kitchen.

My dream’s blue egg carton took me quickly to the Working Knowledge Initiative: where too, six individuals are “contained” in a temporary conveyance— a project team focused upon a joint business idea to which each team member brings her thinking, skills, and abilities. Team facilitation provides a time-limited structure (much like the plastic egg carton), for ideas to “hatch” (and here the idea of egg moves to the fertility of group creativity!).

Great dream image: temporary organization, the security it provides for the incubation of creative and fertile business thought, and the linkage of something learned long ago through personal experience (through evoked memory) to useful application in thinking, today!

And it’s a valid point. Actually, its more than valid. It’s a position that is argued from successful personal accomplishment. It is a position that demands closer attention and elaboration.

In its strongest form, this “NO!” is a psychologically meaningful assertion of successful personal development. It is the  “no” of midlife—–a firm “no” of deep conviction— sculpted and honed through years of managing personal risks and emphatically marking both what the individual will do and what the individual will not. It is the “no” that marks out who I am and what I do from deep inside; and in so doing, defines my personal identity.

What this “NO” both  hides and affirms— is its underlying “YES”. This “YES” is an assertion of personal worth: of cumulative success measured by countless examples of triumph over defeat, across long years both of formal education and workplace learning.

The midlife “NO” is radically different from the “NO” of adolescence: that earlier “NO” anxiously negates, striving to arrive at a future security of identity: NO (that jacket doesn’t define me); NO (I never read that author); NO (that music is awful); NO (my parents know nothing). It is exactly the evolution from this adolescent NO that Mark Twain references in his classic self-reflective observation that his father grew wiser as he, the son, grew older.

So, unlike the insecure and intolerant “NO” of adolescence, the midlife “NO” simply states its limitations in the negative: I don’t do that is another way of stating that I do this. It is founded on the security of arrival at a sense, consciously understood or unspoken, of WHO the person is: “No” declares who I am.  In this sense, the assertion , “I don’t do entrepreneurship” is simply a shorthand for suggesting what it is that I do comfortably. It is a shorthand for suggesting my capabilities, the things I know and have learned over my working lifetime.

“I don’t do entrepreneurship”, approached from this angle translates into “ I haven’t done entrepreneurship” or “I have no idea of my capability in entrepreneurship.” It suggests not knowing rather than a rejection founded in knowledge.

This is the side of the Midlife “No” that remains open to learning, that appreciates that the limits of knowing are not necessarily final. This is the side of the Midlife “Yes” that suggests the possibility of lifelong learning— of expanding one’s skill set through new learning and experience.

However, by its nature in asserting “No” while also meaning “Yes”, the Midlife “No” can also be stressed too hard: and then it bounces back, defiant as an adolescent in its “No”. Under harsh conditions of disappointment and loss— like our current economic turbulence and increasing levels of unemployment, the Midlife NO can rigidify and display its hard demeanor— just as an exasperated parent must sometimes draw the line for demanding children and affirm, “No, I don’t do theme parks”.

Involuntary job loss is such a stressor. It strikes the individual from the outside, from the external world. And whether or not one appreciates that it should not be taken personality, unemployment feels extremely personal.  It is an external threat that resounds as a threat to personal and familial balance. Suddenly, the world of opportunity is experienced as contracting. The future use of savings and investments diminish as we begin to spend down in the present. The prospect of no work seems to loom ominously forward, seemingly to a very distant horizon.

Tragically, the comfort in self and accomplishment expressed by the Midlife “NO” begins to wobble and shake as we react to this environmental shift by aggressively marketing who we’ve been. We rewrite our resumes and network continuously, trying to find the lost fit with who we were, how we knew ourselves only yesterday. Our sense of self plummets, and we begin to feel diminishing worth and self-regard.
The Midlife “NO”  jumps in to aid us. “No” now reminds us of  our old boundaries— attempting to preserve our old sense of who we were, what we were willing and unwilling to do, as we bend ourselves to new, unpleasant imperatives. This preservative use of the Midlife “NO” comes with a price.

By hardening itself toward other uses of our internal strengths, we become more and more desperate in demanding opportunities which may be non-existent. Preserving our self-esteem while we feel under economic and emotional siege, this use of the Midlife “NO” may oddly prohibit recognition of new economic and emotional securities, possible in a changing external world.

How does this obstacle develop ? By our limitation of our ingenuity to well-known paths of adaptation: like finding a likely job interview despite what we know to be diminishing odds. We transform the hard boundaries of our “No” to what feels like a productive, if limited “Yes”. We say we are willing to rewrite our resumes, to ask for a lower salary, to make those phone calls and to market ourselves aggressively; but there is a limit too, a hard stop.

That is: there is a limit to what we won’t do. And that limit is defined by the familiarity of our old decision rule: the midlife NO.

Only this time, by saying NO, we negate the possibility of new learning, because we are anxious and hurting, hunkering down rather than opening up. In saying No now, we say “NO” to a truism we’ve all learned from  living as long as we have: that we are continually thrown upon new cycles of learning that proceed from new types of uncertainty to new types of mastery. And while old skills always help, an open mind is also a critical necessity.

At this point, the certainty of “NO” acts to block possibility; and to enshrine personal identity as something once gained: BUT NOW LOST: a permanent disappointment with recovery questionable.

It need not be this way. The most profound meaning of the Midlife NO is in defining the outline of the Midlife YES. Only by consolidating the productive blocks of what we know, and how they can be of value now, will we be able to go forward— -to future, productive assertions of our self-esteem and successes at mastering life’s challenges.

A: The Working Knowledge Initiative will begin its Manhattan, Community-Wide program on November 3 under the sponsorship of Congregation B’nai Jeshurun and the Accord Advisory Group. The current recession has caused much anguish and pain to many in our City. For the midlife professional, now underemployed or unemployed, the work situation may seem bleak. The Working Knowledge Initiative is a social action project that provides: 1) information about business creation; 2)  an opportunity to meet other midlife professionals in the same situation— and also interested in creating new uses for what they know.

Q: You mentioned that there are two parts. What are they?

A: The weekly meetings, beginning on Tuesday morning November 3, will be offered free of charge. They will focus both on addressing psychological obstacles to new business creation and the kinds of skills necessary for new business development. If after meeting and discussing new business creation, a group of 5 or 6 decides to go forward with its entrepreneurial dream, BJ-WKI will offer a 3-month, intensive, team-building and coaching program at a very modest fee.

Q: What’s “modest”?

A: $100 plus an afternoon of community service.

Q: OK. That’s modest. But you’re giving this thing away, how good can it be?

A: The retail cost of the team facilitation is $10,000. Together, BJ and Accord are giving back to the Community.

Q: Its sounding better. Who will facilitate the groups?

A. A team of organizational business consultants from the Accord Advisory Group.

Q: What’s that?

A: C’mon, you’re on the site…..take a look

Two years ago, the regional meeting of the International Society for the Psychoanalytic Study of Organizations (ISPSO) was riveted by a keynote speaker from Dublin, Annette Clancy, whose insights into the business uses of the virtual world were both thrilling and terrifying for us. Thrilling because of a potential that had developed during our professional lives, of which we were somewhat aware- but to which we were not attuned ( our professional focus was on exploring others’ internal (rather than external) worlds). Terrifying because she’d challenged us to explore the unknown— and this would require a technological learning curve including the dedication of time and effort.

At the time, Accord was developing the Working Knowledge Initiative. Our focus was on business plan development and the creation of a replicable intervention model that got the job done: succeeded both in moving working groups toward successful business creation and succeeded in negotiating the interpersonal challenges presented in the coming-together, face-to-face, of creative people. Annette’s idea of developing virtual muscle— of presenting what we had to the virtual world and learning from it— really did shake us out of  a comfortable dream; and like a good analyst, present us with the dawning of reality.

Well, the virtual is real: real people, real ideas. Ireland, for example, is hosting its “web awards” this weekend, in Dublin. Real recognitions. Real people. Blogger Damien Mulley subtitles his blog, “Invisible People Have Invisible Rights.” I would add that the cloak of invisibility also allows tremendous generosity in the exchange of thought: others’ thoughts that help our own.

Its a commonplace that the web has supercharged our capacity to communicate. Its imperative to learn how to sustain the conversation— contributing to its cascade of voices and ideas, as we draw and learn from it. Its imperative for us Baby Boomers to expand our boundaries and incorporate present-knowing into our working knowledge.