“The Five Sources of Uncertainty” — @CedricChin

Why this is in the vault

Cedric on uncertainty as the ground state of business and career, not a problem to be solved. RDCO is itself a high-uncertainty bet (agent ops as a category is 18 months old) — these pieces are the operating manual for navigating that without overfitting to any single narrative.

The core argument

A taxonomy of where uncertainty actually comes from in business decisions: market dynamics, competitor moves, regulatory shifts, technological change, internal-execution variance. Different sources demand different treatment — lumping them as ‘general uncertainty’ produces strategies that don’t address any of them well.

Mapping against Ray Data Co

Two applications: (1) the founder’s own decision cadence — short OODA loops over long planning cycles, since the agent-ops landscape changes monthly; (2) how we advise clients on AI adoption — ‘no normal’ means refusing to give clean ROI projections and instead structuring engagements as cheap-to-run experiments with measurable learning output.

Related

• 2026-04-15-commoncog-no-truth-in-business-only-knowledge
• 2026-04-15-commoncog-process-improvement-is-hard

Source: The Five Sources of Uncertainty by Cedric Chin (Commoncog). 3316 words. Filed 2026-04-19 as part of Start-Here + Business-Expertise-Triad backfill cohort.