Uncharted
How to Map the Future
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
'An urgent read … Karl Popper for the 21st century' Robert Phillips, former CEO, Edelman EMEA and author of Trust me, PR is Dead
'Heffernan is ... a deft storyteller. Uncharted is ... wise and appealingly human' Tim Harford, Financial Times
How can we think about the future? What do we need to do – and who do we need to be?
In her bold and invigorating new book, distinguished businesswoman and author Margaret Heffernan explores the people and organisations who aren’t daunted by uncertainty. We are addicted to prediction, desperate for certainty about the future. But the complexity of modern life won’t provide that; experts in forecasting are reluctant to look more than 400 days out. History doesn’t repeat itself and even genetics won’t tell you everything you want to know. Ineradicable uncertainty is now a fact of life.
In complex environments, efficiency is a hazard not a help; being robust is the better, safer option. Drawing on a wide array of people and places, Margaret Heffernan looks at long-term projects developed over generations that could never have been planned the way that they have been run. Experiments, led by individuals and nations, discover new possibilities and options. Radical exercises in forging new futures with wildly diverse participants allow everyone to create outcomes together that none could do alone. Existential crises reveal the vital social component in resilience. Death is certain, but how we approach it impacts the future of those we leave behind. And preparedness – doing everything today that you might need for tomorrow – provides the antidote to passivity and prediction.
Ranging freely through history and from business to science, government to friendships, this refreshing book challenges us to resist the false promises of technology and efficiency and instead to mine our own creativity and humanity for the capacity to create the futures we want and can believe in.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The future is unpredictable, but wrestling productively with that unpredictability can help one grow and learn, argues entrepreneur Heffernan (Beyond Measure) in a wide-ranging outing with relevance both for businesspeople and general readers. Overreliance on apps, she proposes, has trained people to see the future as being knowable and to get frustrated when it inevitably isn't. However, this thinking has deeper roots, as Heffernan illustrates by recounting various failed attempts at prognostication throughout history, such as by "exuberant forecasters" of the stock markets, from the field's beginnings in the late 19th century to contemporary gurus like Jim Cramer. She also discusses how people can more productively deal with uncertainty, with examples from both business and other spheres of life. Heffernan looks at how Nokia rebounded from its disastrous loss of the smartphone market to Apple by "constructing and testing out a variety of scenarios," rather than trying to formulate a "single, perfect plan." Elsewhere, she describes how, over a century, the citizenry of Barcelona has sustained construction on architect Antoni Gaud 's extravagant, controversial, and still-unfinished cathedral, Sagrada Familia. The cumulative result of Heffernan's smartly assembled case studies and insights is a thought-provoking look at how readers can face down a sometimes frightening future with courage and grace.
