By: Alireza Hejazi

Understanding the concept of uncertainty and its natural implications is one of the main pillars of futurist thought. In fact, without understanding uncertainty every effort in thinking about the future will end in vain. Up to now numerous articles and books have been written on uncertainty and its different aspects. Sometimes, reading these works leads to more complication of the issue for readers (especially novices) in capturing main points and ideas that are necessary for understanding uncertainty. Through following 6 simple steps you will got the main topics in this regard.

1. Uncertainty with the Future

The future is uncertain. This is a well-known sentence mostly uttered by the futurists. We should admit uncertainty when we are thinking and talking about the future. The future is fundamentally an adventure. Although scientific laws and principles allow for some degree of prediction regarding the future, there is also an irreducible element of uncertainty to the unfolding of time.

A loss of mental imagery and energy often occurs because of fear of the future, either because of its perceived uncertainty or because the images have become too negative, anxiety producing, or even terrifying. Of course, given the uncertainty of the future, the issue of what is realistic and what is unrealistic is often debatable.

People often refuse to anticipate or plan for the future much because the future is to some degree unpredictable, and where there is uncertainty, there is the possibility of frustration and disappointment. Because of the uncertainty of the future, for many people, to different degrees, the future is something to fear. People often retreat to the past or hold on to the present because it is more tangible, certain, and determinate. Peter Russell argues in The White Hole in Time that people have a psychological attachment to time, viewing their personal identity as bound up with what happens in time. Therefore, people fear time because they fear for their very survival. The future may change them or even terminate their existence.[1] They are not certain about their future.

2. The Nature of Uncertainty

The uncertainty of tomorrow is partially a reflection of the nature of reality itself (it appears that we do not live in a totally deterministic universe), but our uncertainty about the future is also due to the present limitations of our knowledge, predictive powers, and imagination. The various sources of uncertainty about the future - ignorance concerning the current conditions, surprise due to the emergence of novel phenomena, and volition that is impact of human choice and action, make the uncertainty deep. Uncertainty does not mean that everything is open.[2] Radical uncertainty lies at the heart of everything because everything is socially constructed.[3]

Perhaps the optimists are right and the contemporary transformation is moving in a positive direction, but even many of them would agree that there is clearly a dimension of uncertainty associated with our present situation. There are different interpretations of the nature and direction of events and trends in our modern world – often clearly at odds with each other. This multiplicity of points of view in fact contributes to the overall uncertainty of things.

To add to the uncertainty of our journey into the future we find many answers – perhaps too many answers - often contradictory and conflicting – over the direction in which we are heading - vying for our attention and commitment on the horizon of tomorrow.[4]

Change and uncertainty cross all driving forces. These changes and uncertainties will add to confusion in our daily functioning but also in the overall process of "anticipating the future". Some of this uncertainty is caused by the rapidity of change, the new ways (values?) of looking at change (and the inherent conflicts of these new values and the existing and familiar ones), and of course the driving forces of change. Living with uncertainty and flexibility will become a guiding principle for approaching the future. Understanding paradigm shifts and driving forces helps immensely in dealing with this uncertainty.

Decision making under uncertainty can be so frustrating that wrong or no decisions are made. An alternative framework is proposed focused on flexibility: finding, testing and implementing policies that work regardless. Policies have built-in mechanisms to change with circumstances.

Furthermore, as people perform activities in order to achieve outcomes that reduce the amount of uncertainty or equivocality that has to be dealt with, the knowledge (both personal and social) that may be drawn upon is considered to be always undergoing change.  Managers may generally view their organization’s relationship with its environment in terms of managing (or reducing) uncertainty in accordance with the methods for problem solving contained within their accepted or dominant paradigm.

3. Dealing with Uncertainty

What will we discover in the future? What will we create? What great wonders lie beyond the horizon of tomorrow? Where is human society headed? How might humanity, biologically or psychologically, be transformed? What new revelations and achievements, technologically, scientifically, and even spiritually will emerge? Is humanity a stepping-stone on the journey of life and mind within the cosmos? What unbelievable realities will evolve in the universe and will we participate in their creation? As fundamental uncertainty begins to pervade the world of science, will we find that our technologies have outpaced our ability to understand the kinds of changes they are wreaking? The vast reaches and mysteries of the future seem to extend to infinity, challenging our intellect and expanding our consciousness and imagination.

The opening years of the twentieth century were marked by optimistic expectations of ever-increasing certainty and scientific and technological progress. Yet the century turned out to be an age of growing cracks in the facade of classical certainty, as relativity, quantum physics and chaos theory each deepened our understanding of the universe yet raised fundamental challenges to ideas about knowledge.[5]

Most people crave certainty, yet we live in an increasingly uncertain world. Since it is not possible to know much for certain anymore, we must become skilled at sailing into the unknown. Life is inherently uncertain-from the moment of our birth to the unknown moment of our death-and yet we hate uncertainty, particularly in business. Business leaders traditionally have viewed uncertainty as the enemy. Skilled management is often seen as the process of avoiding unpleasant surprises. Uncertainty is something to be nailed down and rooted out, an evil that detracts from one's ability to manage with control. Uncertainty creates obstacles for the organization in generating profits and ensuring consistent performance.

4. Scenarios and Uncertainty

Scenarios are concerned with underlying judgments about the future and give explicit attention to sources of uncertainty without trying to turn an uncertainty into a probability. A major focus is how the future can evolve from today's point-in-time to the future that has unfolded by the horizon year of the scenario - say 10 years hence. The relationship between the critical uncertainties (as they resolve themselves - one way or the other), important predetermined trends (such as demographics, e.g. the proportion of Iran - population who are in various age bands in, say. 10 years time) and the behavior of actors who have a stake in the particular future (and who will tend to act to preserve and enhance their own interests within that future) are thought through in the process of scenario planning such that the resultant pen-pictures are in fact, seen as plausible to those who have constructed the scenarios.

Scenario planning contains a qualitative methodology for dealing with decision making under uncertainty that we advocate as an important precursor to quantitative decision analysis.[6] Scenario analyses are an often-used tool in long-term planning. In contrast to prognoses they provide a suitable handling of the uncertainty context of strategic decisions in complex situations. The use of scenarios as a tool for assessing the range of future uncertainty usually involves an implicit assumption that the playing out of the various uncertainties in different ways leaves the world as a whole much the same, in spite of differences from the perspective of specific groups or organizations.

5. Economic and Scientific Uncertainties

Uncertainty is a key factor in trying to anticipate economic conditions more than a few years into the future, and reviewing the other driving forces and paradigm shifts is more important for this driving force as it is so interdependent on other world conditions. Looking beyond 2010, new research will almost certainly create new challenges for both science and business. Models of atmospheric chemistry and climate change could rewrite business plans and policy alike as we gain a deeper understanding of the impacts of greenhouse gases.

Whether or not these changes represent radical refinements of widely used models, they’ll probably require markets to adjust the ways they value carbon as a commodity; potentially new models could disrupt existing regulatory regimes. Hedging against this scientific uncertainty, while taking advantage of commercial opportunities, will be a key strategic challenge for individuals, companies, and states.

The uncertainty for the next decade is how those in power will respond to technologies of mutual transparency, or in David Brin’s terms, “reciprocal accountability.” In societies with traditions of free speech and politics, the strongest push-back against these technologies may come in the form of intellectual-property controls.

Today, we may be entering a similar era of basic uncertainty in science. And once again, the very success of our tools for exploring the world, creating and managing knowledge, and crafting intelligence is to blame. We’re beginning to see a mismatch between technical success and scientific knowledge. Evolutionary-design techniques, in which computers “evolve” and test solutions to technical problems are starting to yield designs that work well, but border on the inexplicable.

In emergence, problem solving is running ahead of understanding. Scientists can mimic emergent phenomena across the physical and biological sciences. However, it’s not clear why emergence happens and whether it’s possible to test theories of emergence using the traditional scientific method.

Finally, evolutionary and emergent systems learn from their mistakes, grow stronger and subtler, and eventually could evolve into intelligences as incomprehensible as their designs. Other branches of science are dealing with a split between the volumes of data produced and the power of the theories used to make sense of them.

In high-energy physics, factory-sized instruments are turning out terabytes of data per year, and a new generation of instruments is about to generate an order of magnitude more information. Yet string theory, which attempts to make sense of that information, is still contentious.[7] It seems no end to all of these uncertainties.

6. Key Imperatives for Success

Contrary to the stereotype of the wise person having all the answers, the wise person acknowledges the uncertainty of things and is actually curious, non-authoritarian, aware of his or her limitations, filled with questions, and consequently active in the pursuit of new knowledge.[8] Succeeding in an uncertain world requires considering these three key imperatives seriously:

•   Corporations will have developed a new dynamic approach to strategy formulation - collaborative, drawing on key signals from all quarters, and constantly evolving in the light of new circumstances.

•   Leaders of these corporations will seek to build resilience and flexibility into the very fabric of the organization, by developing a set of core capabilities.

•   Corporations who succeed in the future will be those whose leaders remain steadfast in the face of uncertainty, and who have the qualities to manage change effectively.[9]

If we are going to speak about uncertainty, we may have to give many hours of speeches and lectures and even write several volumes of books. I think 6 mentioned above items can be regarded as the essence of all of these discussions.