The title of an upcoming presentation I will deliver next week is “Adapting to Uncertainty.” It should be very clear by now that we live in extremely uncertain times. I maintain that the world has not been this uncertain since a series of twentieth century catalysts established our modern day. The reason lies in the similarities between our current times and that period decades ago. The world back then experienced uncertainty across multiple domains: science, technology, society, geopolitics, economics, and business. The breadth of change occurring across those domains made the period one of the most turbulent in human history. The uncertainty of our current world did not just emerge, it has been years in the making. As it did in that earlier period, the convergence of multiple forces created the current environment. In studying those forces, our ability to adapt became a central tenet of my thinking, alongside seeing the future and continually rehearsing it.

A recent article focuses on uncertainty in the economic domain. The authors describe an advantage of their text-based approach to analyzing uncertainty – they can break out the drivers of uncertainty by analyzing which words appear alongside mentions of uncertainty. They identified five forces in the recent past driving economic uncertainty: Brexit Vote, Trump election, tariff wars, Covid-19, and the war in Ukraine. They also have a suggestion for how to adapt in uncertain times: pay attention to global politics and economics, be flexible, plan for a world of global shocks.