Embracing the unknown: Jaana Venkula’s path to navigating uncertainty
- Hanna Haliseva
- Jun 9
- 4 min read
Embracing the unknown: Jaana Venkula’s path to navigating uncertainty
In an era where the rules-based world order feels increasingly threatened and the future feels impossible to predict, many of us feel paralyzed by strategic anxiety. Traditional western philosophy often focuses on changing "minds", attitudes, motivations, and values, to influence behavior. However, the philosophy of Jaana Venkula flips this assumption on its head with a radical starting point: “In the beginning is a deed”.
Who was Jaana Venkula?
Jaana Venkula (1942-2025) was a distinguished Finnish social psychologist, researcher, lecturer, and author whose work has transformed the lives of students and leaders alike. For many years, she taught the profound connection between “doing and knowing” at the University of Helsinki, where she was known for guiding graduate students through the creative and often frustrating process of thesis research. Beyond academia, she founded Fluctuale Consulting, where she applied her multidisciplinary insights—spanning social science, neuroscience, and philosophy—to mentor leadership in both public and private sectors on change management and organizational culture.
Throughout her prolific career, Jaana published a significant body of work, including nine key books between 1988 and 2012 that explored the skill of doing, the power of asking, and the necessity of art. Her central philosophy emphasized that we are not monolithic entities but collections of potentials that become stronger through repeated practice. By focusing on the selfless practical human being, she encouraged individuals to stop mining their psyche for explanations of ill-being and instead recognize themselves as active participants in the world through their daily actions.
Uncertainty as a life-preserving force
While we often view uncertainty as a threat to be managed or eliminated, Jaana argued that uncertainty is actually a life-preserving human experience. It keeps us sensitive, humble, and careful, whereas the illusion of absolute certainty can make individuals hard, proud, and reckless. In our modern "society of uncertainty," former knowledge often leads us astray, and we must instead develop new skills to face the unpredictable.
The primacy of the deed
The core of Jaana's approach is that deeds create knowledge that cannot be acquired through words or analysis alone. When we face a shock or conflict that causes "pathless anxiety" (aporia), our first instinct is often to analyze the emotion. Jaana’s Spiral of Action suggests a different path: instead of dwelling on the feeling, embark immediately on an experimental deed.
Even mundane, everyday tasks—what Jaana called focal practices—such as cleaning, gardening, or baking, serve as vital tools for personal growth. These deeds engage our mental system in all its dimensions:
Emotional: The initial nudge or "alarm" that an event is happening.
Empirical: The actual doing and use of skills.
Ethical: Choosing the "best" and most life-promoting path.
Aesthetic: Organizing chaos into logic and harmony.
Epistemic: Utilizing facts and prior knowledge to support the process.
Transforming anxiety into joy
In this philosophy, anxiety is not an illness to be medicated; it is a signal that you are a creative, problem-solving living creature engaged in a process of understanding. By repeating ethically right and high-quality deeds, these actions eventually become habits and, ultimately, a form of experiential knowledge that constitutes the self.
As we navigate the "fluctuating processes" of life—those unpredictable events that have no clear mechanical map—we learn that trust is the only certainty in uncertainty. By focusing on what we do right now, we create a "thread of happiness" (Eupraxia – doing good and well) and develop the dynamic peace of mind necessary to face whatever the next moment may bring.
Uncertainty is normal, certainty is not
In the context of TRIC, this means that we are normalising uncertainty as an essential feature of anything people are doing as human beings. It seems that only some elements of the world are certain, like machines and most technological processes. Chemical and physical interactions and laws are still valid. But even in this world, like in the realm of string theory in relation what matter is and how it behaves, or in the context of time, space and mass, things become and are uncertain.
And what about the laws of entropy, where we measure disorder, randomness, or how "spread out" energy becomes in a system? Across physics, chemistry, and everyday life, isolated systems naturally progress from an orderly, concentrated state to a highly chaotic, dispersed state where uncertainty is the normal, certainty just a minor feature of the world. When we work from the viewpoint of uncertainty, we can see it as skill and environment building exercise, where we maintain our resilience personally, as a culture and as a society to face the uncertainties of life. We need to build the feeling of competence in us and in every new generation, protecting life using ethics as an everyday feature in our thinking and actions.
Markus Vähälä
Communications and dissemination lead at TRIC-project
Network coordinator at Kukunori
Co-director of Fluctuale Consulting
All had been made possible by the European Union Erasmus Plus Programme!
Curious about TRIC? Stay tuned — and feel free to reach out if you'd like to know more at connect@communitytric.net
#ProfessionalDevelopment #UncertaintyCompetence #TRIC #ErasmusPlus #HigherEducation #VET #Innovation #FutureOfWork #LifelongLearning
Turku University of Applied Sciences, Kukunori, MARKED with Purpose, Innocamp Poland, Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV), Erhvervsakademi SydVest, Business College Syd, IES Bernat Guinovart, Jugend am Werk, University for Continuing Education Krems and the University of Gdańsk.
