Only those who know the supremacy of the intellectual life—the life which has a seed of ennobling thought and purpose within it—can understand the grief of one who falls from that serene activity into the absorbing soul-wasting struggle with Worldly annoyances. Intellect is itself a mode of exaggeration, and destroys the harmony of any face. The moment one sits down to think, one becomes all nose, or forehead, or something horrid. Everyone will speak of the fair as his own market has gone in it. We can build an awareness of what we do not know about the future into our approach to the World by crafting methods to react quickly to change rather than trying to predict it. Ambiguity does not have to be paralyzing or distasteful. The end of uncertainty is the death of interest. There is no such thing as living without being beholden to somebody. Nothing, next to curiosity, makes a man so true to his appointment as interest. It is an age so full of light, that there is scarce a country or corner of Europe, whose beams are not crossed and interchange with others. Under the right conditions, as we will see, embracing uncertainty can in fact provide opportunities to innovate. It can inspire creative solutions, and might even make us better people. A time comes to every one of us when we cannot help ourselves, and then we must get others to help us. The fox’s case must help when the lion’s skin is out at the elbow. This scarecrow of a suit has, in course of time, become so complicated, that no person alive knows what it means.

 The parties to it understand it at least; but it has been observed that no two Chancery lawyers can talk about it for five minutes, without coming to a total disagreement to all the premises. A group of boys joins a sailing vessel to take a life experience class as a way of seeing the World and completing their last years of high school on a ship called the Albatross. The boys learn to work together and act as a team, Gil Martin goes from crying and wetting his pants, to becoming a charming young man and a brave scholar, as the boys discover discipline life, and comrades on an ill-fated sailing voyage, as the storm one of the most intense storms ever hit was on its way. As the boys and the crew shove off on their way into the bright future, striking without a warning—a white squall hit. These are violent metrological events, with 150 miles per hour winds, 50 – foot waves, and potentially 25 inches of rainfall per minute, there is so much wind and rain that it is difficult to see. While navigating a ship, white squall can skin your boat into the unusually light abyss. Combating its dangers means design institutions and processes that make us less likely to succumb to our natural tendencies toward resolution when it matters most. The right negotiators will stay calm in the face of fluid, incomplete, and seemingly contradictory information. The right reminders at decision points will lower own requirement for closure.

 We also are requiring to recognize that we cannot always resolve ambiguity by seeking out more information. As we saw in the film White Squall, all seeking out information on the accident did was ruin people’s lives because they were getting close to uncovering the fact that Gil Martin was drugged and locked in his room, and forced to go down with the ship. In times of stress, psychological pressure compels us to deny or dismiss inconsistent evidence, pushing us to perceive certainty and clarity where there is neither. Unpleasant anxiety, like what Gil Martin experienced when he found himself floating in water up to his neck, while the door was bolted shut, can compel us to seize and freeze on ideas and beliefs in areas of life completely unrelated to the source of that anxiety. When we feel something is off balance, like a ship hit by a 50-foot wave, rain, and hurricane force winds, we have seen that we can try to uncover the origin of the imbalances in conflicting or ideas or events. For instance, when the boys where on the ship and the dolphin came by, they ran out of the classroom to see it and play with it. However, Frank Beaumont was forced to go on the ship and did not want to be there and had threaten to shot one of the boys while his back was turned, but decided to shoot and kill the dolphin instead. We have explored how the urge to resolve ambiguity is deeply rooted, multifaceted, and often dangerous. As we make decisions, we need to recognize both the consequences of a decision and our current requirement for closure. In doing so, we can avoid grasping for new solutions in panic or sticking too rigidly to old ones.

 Being humble and flexible as a matter of character is one thing. Constructing a new business model predicated on not knowing is another. Self-satisfaction is a terrible trap if you want to achieve anything important. Ambiguity tolerance is one of the most critical variables linked to higher financial performance. I have been using the term uncertainty to refer to the mind state caused by facing ambiguous information. When the white squall hits the Albatross, Skipper Sheldon gives the crew specific instructions, but the member guiding the questioned the accuracy of the order given and made his own decision on how to steer the ship, which may have proved to be a fatal decision. In forecasting, we should distinguish another cause of feelings of uncertainty: risk. Risky choices are those where the outcome is not known but the odds of success are. By following his own mind, the sailor does not know if he caused the ship to crash, ignoring the Skippers orders was like flipping a coin, you do not know that outcome of your choice. Ambiguous choices—the focus of White Squall is unknown because the rules determining the outcome are unclear. The Skipper was an experienced sailor, and knew the odds of his orders over unclear probabilities, introduced by this seaman, even when that preference is not rational.

 How we make predictions based on unclear odds affects a range of personal decisions. Like when Gil Martin overcomes his fear of height and climbs the mast on the ship, and makes it to the top and down without having an accident. In the real World, few big decisions have relatively clear, and entirely known odds. Even the likelihood of our daily choices, we do not have the information to know exactly what will happen. The reason Skipper allowed the Cuban war ship’s crew to come on the Albatross and check everyone’s passports, even though they had fired at them, which was act of war and illegal, Skipper figured letting the hostel Cubans to board the Albatross was the best decision because it might prevent a deadly combat. In the business World, mishandling ambiguous odds can be especially detrimental. It can lead to death or bankruptcy. When committed strategies do succeed, they pay off because of the lag time it takes for other firms to catch up. The Cubans find everything on the Albatross in order, and are more humiliated than a bankrupt company, and bust the navigation system up so the crew will have to manage just to merely survive while find their way on this journey. With no navigation, anyway you turn has the greatest possibility of success and also the greatest possibility of failure, and breakthrough of success often hinges on lucky bets and beautiful stars.

Wars, oil prices, natural disasters, a bolt of lightning that that ignites a fire and burns down a sail, the list of unknowns that can make or break a business is endless. If a white squall really does exists, it is frighteningly easy to make ordering decisions that result in returning inventory problems. Cisco once wrote off a $2.2 billion loss in supply chain disaster in which they spent two billion dollars on raw materials, parts, and products that it had no hope of either selling or using. The company also terminated 18 percent of its staff, over 8,000 employees. In 2013, Target’s sales in Australia were suffering under an estimated $100 million in surplus product that included unsold winter gear. The easiest way to liquidate extra stock is to discount it, dump it, or destroy it. That is why Frank’s father went to visit Frank while he was in the middle of his trip on the Albatross, it was a death mission and he wanted to have a steak dinner with his son, as he would later be collecting his life insurance money, which is why Frank knew shooting the dolphin was the best way to abort this suicide mission.  One company even advertises its talents in destroying expired inventory like unsold board games, toys, and sports cards on these ships to collect maximum profits. In any case, you are losing money. Human capital, livestock, and the environment are the most valuable assets known to man. If you are forced to discount stock, moreover, you often have to take more losses to advertise the discounts. Skipper advised his wife, Dr. Alice Sheldon, and she was lost like luggage in the white squall.

Treasury Wine Estates, one of the World’s largest vintners, recently announced that it would have to dump $35 million worth of old and obsolete wine and increase discounts and rebates to the sum of $40 million, this news caused the company’s shares to fall by 12 percent. Navigating the sea calmly during a white squall can be especially tricky in the ready-to-wear Captain’s hat industry. According to experts, the deaths on the Albatross were the result of inventory and navigation issues.  The bullwhip effect of going against Skipper’s orders caused the normal ebbs and flows in wave’s demand into a costly nightmare. The unpredictable and distorted information led to every entity on the ship from the captain or master to the third mate to face uncertainties and variabilities. That is too much of an adjustment for an inexperienced member to make and caused them to experience the bullwhip effect. At its root, overcorrecting caused the ship to overact to ambiguous odds because a crew member assumed that he could predict more about the future than is actually possible. Fortunes, as well as reputations, were at stake. We have a multimillion-dollar business to run, and we are not laughing all the way to the bank. Our whole economy is based on planned obsolescence. The ghost of couture detail the true cost of reckless behavior. In theory, by cutting out the storeroom (and intermediary), you could reduce the uncertainty of not having full control over your purchase.  All sorts of purchases, in fact, can serve to reduce the anxiety of various mental conflicts. We would all like to buy our way out of life’s troublesome trade-offs.

Maybe we want to have duck dinner with Buck, but only have cash for one, or maybe we want to make our mortgage payment but also desperately need a vacation. Or maybe we do not have enough time to both achieve our career goals and raise a family. Only the well-off have the means to purchase their way out of these inner conflicts, while low-income families are stuck grappling with the unresolved stress such contradiction cause. Rich shoppers are likely to buy more than they need to escape uncertainty. Some will only restock what has been purchased instead of trying to anticipate demand. Forecasts would not trigger production—consumer decisions would. The Albatross was littered with morbid tales of shipwrecks, and also had a mythology, for good measure, also including folk tales of dark magic and witchery. The ship had said to have ghost walking the deck and in the rooms. Gil Martin learned the Albatross had been owned by gangsters in the 1940s and that a number of people met violent deaths on deck. Then the doors started slamming—for no apparent reason. The jukebox and the television began to blare—on their own. Toilet paper rolls unwound by themselves simultaneously from both the men’s and women’s restroom. Gil martin felt cod spots in the summer, and recalled the scent of gardenias slowly wafting through the bedrooms, lobby, down the hall, and pass the bar. Late one night, Gil heard big band music coming from the Mermaid room.