I feel this may be one of those books that is based on an important and interesting idea - that we have to live with uncertainty and experimentation - but really doesn’t stand up to a whole book. I lost interest with the anecdotes and personal case histories that didn’t seem to me to add much.

This was a quick read due to Heffernan's writing style. I found it somewhat unsatisfying due to the incoherent structure. It was however still an interesting read and I did learn something.

I featured this book in my Forbes.com column and called it out as the best book of 2020 so far:

1 - Uncharted: How To Map The Future by Margaret Heffernan – to expand your thinking with examples from across the globe and across the private, non-profit and public sectors

Uncharted: How To Map The Future by Margaret Heffernan is my favorite book of 2020 so far. Heffernan has been the CEO of multiple businesses, has written six books on business and leadership and is currently a Professor of Practice at the University of Bath. In Uncharted, Heffernan summarizes different approaches to navigating uncertain future outcomes, with examples of scenario planning, cathedral projects, automation and algorithmic decision-making, even counter-terrorism strategies. These diverse techniques for making robust decisions with incomplete information and for navigating long-term complex situations are relevant to career planning. You will always have incomplete information on a new role or prospective employer, and your career is long-term and complex.

At least one, if not several, of these approaches will give you insights for how to plan and manage your own career. There are ample stories that will inspire and convince you that you have more agency over your career than you may think. For example, stories featured in the section probing genetics and the rush to predetermine based on innate talent alone show how significant the impact is of nurturing, of actions leading to subsequent actions and of unexpected opportunities. There are many more examples from scientific research, arts projects, public initiatives, corporate restructurings and more.

HOW TO NAVIGATE THE FUTURE

Taking a cue from Margaret Heffernan, the answer can only be, “With great difficulty.”

To say that her book, <i>Uncharted: How to Navigate the Future</i> tackles the age-old problem that is the inherent unpredictability of the future would be an oversimplification and inaccurate at best. Rather, Heffernan addresses the human folly in seeking certainty about the future—and the presumption that such is at all possible.

It should be obvious that predicting the future is a fool’s errand, and yet as a species we cannot help but have a go at it whenever we please. <a href=“https://brianbelen.blogspot.com/2020/06/think-for-yourself.html”>We turn to “experts” for any number of their forecasts and outlooks</a>, and come away disappointed (<a href=“https://brianbelen.blogspot.com/2015/09/superforecasting.html”>and sometimes even shocked</a>) when these do not pan out. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice? SHAME ON YOU.

Yet we shouldn’t be surprised. As Heffernan points out, “early pioneers [of forecasting] also uncovered three profound problems endemic to forecasts that dog them still today: they are incomplete, ideological, and self-interested.” Because we crave predictability and cling into the illusion that we are completely in control of our own destinies, however, we can’t help but make and rely on forecasts.

The important takeaway from this is not that we need to find a way to come up with better predictive models—arguably a fool’s errand—but rather that we need a way to cope with an uncertain future.

Heffernan alludes to several ways forward in this regard.

One: we should strive to think about future scenarios in probabilistic rather than binary terms. Admittedly, this is easier said than done, as we lack an intuitive grasp of probability general.

Or: we can approach the future adaptively, making constant adjustments to our expectations as situations develop.

Maybe even: we can set big, audacious, and sometimes intangible future goals for ourselves. Just Like “cathedral projects” whose construction will outlive not just the architects but the organization created to ensure its completion, the pursuit of such lofty goals requires a level of flexibility over the short term in order to achieve the longer term objective(s).

More importantly, Heffernan exhorts us not to be cowed by future uncertainty but to engage it—and engage it together. “Our choice is not between false certainty and ignorance,” she writes, “it is between surrender or participation.” And participate we should, lest someone else write our future for us. But the best way to do so is to recognize that we need to rely on each other in order to so effectively. “Navigating the future,” Heffernan reminds us, “whether away from danger or toward opportunity, has to be a collective activity because no one person can see enough.”

Navigating the future in all its uncertainty is therefore not so much a problem as it is a challenge. Shall we be resigned to the enormity of the task or step up to shape it as best we can? Will we be pigheaded and try to go it alone or shall we trust in the best of our fellow man and do so together? For Heffernan, the answer is clear. “The future will always be uncharted,” she writes, “but it is made by those active enough to explore it, with the stamina and imagination not to give up on themselves or each other.”

I was interested in this book because I noted a recommendation of another book willful blindness by the same author. Loved all the examples and the value of being open to the future and how to deal with complexity. Great idea of cathedral projects with public support. Each example is dealt with a deep dive which will leave you appreciating fo rg artists how they make their futuristic and ahead of times works happen. Do they leap or keep moving to the next possible scenario ie shifting baseline to future such that the increments dont seem abnormal. You will get comfortable dealing with uncertainty without the doom and gloom.

I received a digital pre-publication galley of “Uncharted,” in exchange for a fair review. Margaret Heffernan provides us with a sage and engaging book that is meant to make us more thoughtful and resilient as we confront the future. In the introduction she brilliantly remarks that “We have moved from a complicated world to a complex one.” Complicated scenarios, she argues, follow rules and ultimately can be mastered with analytical thinking. Complex situations are non-linear where small effects may produce large consequences. And throughout the book, her examples typify how seemingly random events can have a significant impact on outcomes.

I can imagine a type of reader thinking, “What? There is no defined, evidence-based sociological or leadership studies that inform a 5-step decision-tree so that your decisions can be 14.7% better?” Alas, this is not the book to feign precision-like estimates to trick us into believing life and all its attendant complexity can be measured like progression on a Gantt chart. A great quote that comes from Paul Krugman, a Noble Prize winner in Economics, is “he thought the data left out of his models might be more important than the data that went in.” This makes the book’s more credible in my opinion. She uses historical events, personal stories and contemporary issues to buttress her main contention that “ordinary people who (are) open-minded, educated, prepared to change their minds, humble and attentive (can) gain real insight and awareness...”

The most revelatory and engaging chapter to me derives from a Stephen Hawking phrase —cathedral project— which he describes as “humanity’s attempt to bridge heaven and earth.” Heffernan writes, “Like the great medieval cathedrals of Europe, they are destined to last longer than a human lifetime, to adapt to changing tastes and technologies, to endure long into the future as symbols of faith and human imagination.” In this chapter, the main focus is CERN (the Center for European Nuclear Research) and its “search for human knowledge” guided by the horrors of World War II in hopes that “working together could be one way to stop the world falling apart again.” Despite the brilliant experiments and findings that have come from this project, Heffernan argues that its success wasn’t due to the “lone genius,” but rather harnessing the collective brilliance of multi-national researchers working together on the voyage to discovery that led to subsequent practical applications like the World Wide Web.

Another important theme of the book is the refutation that Silicon Valley and its religion of big data, AI, deep-learning, etc. will conquer the need for human ingenuity and adaptability. There is a tasty takedown of the lunacy of high profile tech evangelists who believe mortality will be conquered over the next few decades. In fact, we harm our ability to overcome complex problems by outsourcing our minds to technology—“The more we surrender to the authority of devices, the less independent and imaginative our minds becomes, just when we need them most... In a complex world, replete with contingency and uncertainty, nothing could be more dangerous than to constrain imagination, freedom and creativity.”

I encourage all general interest readers to read this book. This book doesn’t purport to tell you how to solve a specific personal, business or societal problem, but it does give one excellent insights about how to approach thinking about them so that you can ask better questions that may eventually lead to breakthrough insights.

This is an incredible book. Margaret Heffernan takes on our false belief that with enough information, planning, strategy & technology we can anticipate the future and even curve it to our liking. She deftly reveals the multiple ways this has not worked out as anticipated, and writes convincingly about why that's not really what we want. Then she offers alternatives & examples that are smart, elegant & thought-provoking. Perhaps her central pitch is the role of human imagination - well developed and widely explored - as the source of what we need to navigate the days to come.

Two chapters stood out to me as especially strong: Her perspective on the role (and scope) of art & artists is so interesting, I read it through twice. And the chapter on why we don't really want to live forever brought me a peace I didn't know I needed.

UNCHARTED is easily one of the best books I've read this year. Highly recommend, especially if you're looking for a broader perspective on how things can go.

Many thanks to the publisher & NetGalley for providing me a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.