Strategic Uncertainty

Uncertainty is timeless. But is it getting faster, fatter, and more feral?

Uncertainty has always been the thorn in the side of our human nature to plot and plan. It plagued the ancients and it plagues us now. Incredibly, it seems to be the one thing we haven’t successfully adapted to. So, how do we face our current unknowns with wisdom and grace?

Ancient uncertainty

All is uncertain; and in the midst of confusion, man strives to find order. - Cicero, c. 44 BC

He who says he knows nothing, knows more than he who says he knows it all. - Epicurus, c. 300BC

I find strange comfort in knowing that what feels like unprecedented uncertainty has always felt that way to those living through it. We are a race that has pushed boundaries for millenia and, with that, alongside the forces we’ve never been able to bend to our will (such as weather), we expand the unknown. In our search for knowledge and mastery, we have succeeded in breeding the unknown and making it more complex and harder to control.

Join me as I explore these topics further.

The evolved unknown

Faster.

With some selective breeding, our uncertainties have evolved. The agricultural age lasted 8,000 years. The industrial one, around 200. The information age? Maybe 50. The AI age? Anyone’s guess.

Technology is, undoubtedly, compounding. We ride on the back of the age that came before and create change that is radically faster.

More multi-faceted.

But technology isn’t the only force at play. We’ve pushed our planet, our finite ecosystem, to the brink of collapse with our numbers and behaviours. In recent times, we’ve got ourselves comfortable in a world order that is unlikely to last.

Today’s fast and multi-faceted forces

So what (in-)exactly are we facing into today? I think there are four forces that are hard to argue against but, due to their interrelations, impossible to predict with certainty.

1. Ageing demographics. We’ve pushed our population beyond the brink of possible and demographic pyrmids are inverting. This is new for our human race — necessary, given Force 2, but new.
2. Planetary boundaries. We’re overstepped them when it comes to our use of finite resources and the impact that’s had on climate and nature. If humans survive, we have to reverse this and regenerate. Or we pay a huge price.
3. AI Era. This is the AI age — for however long it lasts! AI is here to stay, in some form or other, and it’s hard to see a near future that it’s not embedded in our lives like the internet was before it.
4. Deglobalisation. I lived most of my life hearing “the world’s getting smaller”. Recent events are a good marker of that changing. If you subscribe to even a sliver of Peter Zeihan’s “The End of the World is just the Beginning” (easy to do with Trump’s latest moves in mind), you cannot expect the post WWII world order to continue ad infinitum.

Yet, we shrink into todayisms and risk our tomorrow

Instant gratification. Fast-growth funding. Short-term cycles. Information overwhelm.

We can’t keep on top of the pace of change so we shrink our strategy cycles. We focus on the screen in front of us. The here and now is so overwhelming, who can afford to think about tomorrow let alone some future generation’s tomorrow.

But without casting our eyes to the ever-shifting horizon, we risk plummeting faster into the abyss.

Enough doom mongering, you say! Fair.

But for those invested in a tomorrow — for ourselves, for our children, for the human race — we have to get brave and face into that big, ugly, feral future of multiple plausibilities.

So, I will end on this:

Let’s get long-termist. It’s not sexy. It’s really quite scary.

But it is doable.

Long-termism isn’t about knowing the future. It’s about building something that can handle it – whether that’s the business we run or the life we lead.

“I have seen many storms in my life. Most storms have caught me by surprise, so I’ve had to learn very quickly to look further and understand that I am not capable of controlling the weather.” - Paulo Coelho, late 1990s.