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I have written before about the importance of certainty in our lives, from the morning drive to work, bank’s safeguarding our savings and most personal routines. In our jobs, we comply with established processes designed to deliver outcomes. All of these are about reducing risk. But we also enjoy challenging personal pastimes and special projects that offer variety and personal growth, despite the inherent risks. And while some of us are serious risk-takers who climb mountains, most of us are not
Certainty is desirable because it establishes our expectations, guides us through much of every day and eliminates a significant amount of stress from our lives by avoiding risks. And yet, pandemics, blizzards, tainted food and car accidents remind us that life is uncertain.
For complex weapon systems platform acquisition projects worth billions of dollars, Ministers and taxpayers expect a high degree of certainty around efficiency and effectiveness. The good news is most of these acquisitions have been delivered effectively, providing good performance for many years in service. The bad news is they are regularly inefficient, delivering late and at higher costs.
The Defence Investment Agency (DIA) has been established to improve the performance of such complex acquisitions. The challenges facing the DIA are enormous, in terms of eliminating process complexity, achieving culture reform and implementing the Defence Industrial Strategy. However, one stands out for me as the top priority, the expectation of certainty in timely delivery.
A Wise Man Speaks
Robert Timothy Leake’s article entitled ‘Life is Probability’ provides an interesting perspective that addresses the concept of certainty.
The quotations below from the article focus on life in general, but that match my perspectives regarding certainty in complex endeavours:
Either explicitly or implicitly, to treat life as a system that can be controlled: make the right plan, gather enough information, reduce risk and execute well. If you do those things, outcomes should follow. Except they don’t.
When a baby falls while learning to walk, it isn’t failure – it’s information. The same dynamic governs any skill that requires stability in a changing environment... It grows by engaging it… through exposure, correction, and gradual calibration inside uncertainty.
Probabilistic environments don’t reward perfect plans. They reward timely engagement… In real systems, the rules shift, conditions change, learning carries forward, and future moves are shaped by interaction.
The goal is not to eliminate risk. It is to remain exposed enough to learn, while protected enough to continue.
Experienced people notice when conditions are shifting, sense when delay is becoming dangerous, act earlier than comfort would suggest and adjust faster after contact with reality.
Most leadership failure doesn’t come from recklessness. It comes from over-investment in control. Leaders try to eliminate uncertainty.
But experienced leaders don’t expect certainty. They expect variation, and they don’t confuse a single outcome, good or bad, with proof.
You are accountable not just for outcomes, but for whether you acted when action was required, whether you stayed engaged long enough to learn.
Probability tempers explanation and sharpens attention.
Application to the DIA
The author maintains that certainty is the wrong objective. And yet, the DIA has inherited a master class in risk aversion, driven by the belief that control makes certainty likely. This has led to the following examples of behaviours that are counterproductive to minimizing harm to desired outcomes:
Governments mislead when announcing initial project delivery timelines and budget when they do not emphasize the related uncertainty, since very little is known at that point.
Contract lawyers focus on zero-risk-for-Canada contracts by transferring all known risks to industry, but complexity guarantees unpredictable emerging risks that ensure otherwise.
Contractually binding and structured collaboration based on joint working can avoid risks between parties, but are discouraged in government over the risk of unethical activity in relationships damaging contract integrity.
Static risk registers and the necessity for mitigation strategies create complacency and the illusion of reduced risk.
Up-front plans out many years are required for project approvals, which are entirely assumption-based and misleading about the inherent project enterprise risks the farther out you plan.
Processes grow to avoid every realized misstep. This may avoid risk repetition in identical contexts, but the result is a cycle of increased process complexity debt causing more mistakes and more remedial process growth.
Avoidance of the risks of innovation preempt trial-and-error improvement when navigating complexity, so emerging international techniques are rarely adopted.
The public’s expectation of certainty in outcomes atrophies, because governments fear broad transparent and continuous expectation adjustment during project execution.
The required changes are obvious. The DIA culture must shift to one that expects continual change, due to the inevitable risks of such complex acquisitions which span a decade or more. Such a culture would anticipate risk as unavoidable, requiring adaptation supported by seniors.
Rectifying this political obsession with messaging certainty is as important to industry partners as it is to the DIA’s probability of success. The government ‘s culture of risk aversion delays contract awards and amendments, shapes straitjacketed contracts preventing flexibility and assures even later deliveries and the related cost growth which damages reputations.
The Importance of Probability
Certainty suggests a 100% probability. I am not a probability expert, but offer a few considerations:
The key to assessing probability is the amount and assessed validity of information gathered, regarding consequences of various decision options. In complex endeavours, huge assumption based data sets represent estimates for design and construction of unique weapon systems platforms. In such cases, Monte Carlo methods can be employed to generate schedules at various probability levels of confidence.
The common confidence level – often called the ‘sweet spot’ – for proceeding with business decisions is a probability of 70%.
In work breakdown structures including thousands of discrete tasks, it can take many weeks to assess the probability of the impacts on project outcomes from significant emergent risks, thereby introducing an unavoidable period of greater uncertainty.
Once estimated, attention to the errors in assumption-based data based on ground truth is important to reset expectations.
So What
The DIA would be wise to qualify any statements about complex acquisition project outcomes at acquisition project launch and as reality changes. There should be less fear of embracing honesty, as Canadians know what their grandfathers knew – certainty only applies to death and taxes.
The most likely initial DIA challenge is the public’s expectation of much improved timeliness of delivery of ‘big’ military procurement projects, an expectation based on the myth of certainty of knowledge.
Will the DIA be allowed to transparently admit reality upfront and brief periodically about the emergent issues, the need to adapt and the things that were tried but did not work? Will expectations be set properly at project launch, and subsequently managed to educate all Canadians, while gradually improving performance inside the unavoidable uncertainty of each project?
We can hope that the probability of ‘’yes’ answers to both questions is well above 50%.
