(And What To Do About It)
You’re a logistics manager in Nairobi. Monday morning, you’ve got spreadsheets humming, dashboards glowing green, and quarterly targets locked in. By Tuesday afternoon, torrential rains have wiped out three major supply routes.
Your carefully crafted plans? Worthless. Your expensive forecasting software? Silent. What saves you isn’t prediction, it’s adaptation.
Welcome to radical uncertainty, where the old rules of strategic planning are crumbling faster than you can say “five-year forecast.”
The End of Business as Usual
We’ve spent decades building organisations around a comforting fiction: that the future is knowable if we just gather enough data, build better models, and hire smarter analysts. The past few years have shattered that illusion. Supply chains collapsed overnight. Customer behaviour shifted in weeks, not quarters. Technologies that seemed five years away arrived by Friday.
Traditional strategic planning assumed a relatively stable world where change happened gradually. That world no longer exists. According to research from the World Economic Forum, 44% of workers’ core skills will be disrupted by 2027; a pace of change we’ve never seen before. The IMF’s October 2024 economic outlook highlights how geopolitical fragmentation and climate shocks are creating cascading uncertainties across every sector.
Your industry will face radical uncertainty. Will you be ready when it arrives?.
What Radical Uncertainty Actually Looks Like
Forget abstract theory. Radical uncertainty shows up in boardrooms and shop floors every day. A European manufacturer discovers a critical supplier has gone bust. No warning, no backup plan. A fintech start-up in Lagos watches competitors launch AI-powered fraud detection that makes their offering obsolete within months. A Brazilian food distributor faces floods that eliminate transport routes they’ve used for twenty years.
These aren’t edge cases or black swans. They’re the new normal. The OECD’s 2024 risk assessment framework now explicitly accounts for “cascading disruptions”; where one shock triggers three others in unrelated systems. Your technology fails, which breaks your supply chain, which damages customer trust, which invites regulatory scrutiny. One domino falls, and suddenly you’re fighting fires on four fronts.
The companies that thrive aren’t those with the best predictions. They’re the ones who’ve built reflexes for the unpredictable.
Seven Ways of Seeing (That Most Leaders Miss)
The best response to radical uncertainty isn’t better forecasting; it’s better perception and appropriate training. Think of it as upgrading from a single security camera to a full sensory network. Here’s what that looks like in practice:
See Ahead: A mid-sized logistics firm runs monthly “future days” where warehouse staff and executives explore emerging shifts together. When drone delivery suddenly went mainstream in their region, they weren’t caught flat-footed. They’d been tracking the signals for months.
See Behind: After floods shut down key routes, a Brazilian supplier mapped every misstep, every missed partnership opportunity, and built scenario playbooks with local leaders. Old mistakes became new wisdom.
See Above: A Southeast Asian retail CEO doesn’t just review dashboards. She visits rural markets, talks to suppliers, joins regional innovation councils. That’s how she spotted shifting spending patterns when digital payments spread faster than official reports suggested.
See Below: A European manufacturer installed “fix-it panels” where frontline workers flag problems monthly. One team spotted a supply chain vulnerability before it broke, saving millions. Bottom-up insight beats top-down assumption every time.
See Besides: An African fintech host “what if?” workshops with rivals. Former competitors become collaborators when new fraud schemes emerged, co-developing detection tools that protected everyone.
See Beyond: A South American insurer brought in artists, scientists, community voices and insurance experts to rebuild trust after deepfake scams hit the industry. Outside perspectives revealed solutions internal teams would never find.
See It Through: A global agri-tech start-up commits to three-month field tests for every major idea. No exceptions, no excuses. Ideas don’t gather dust in the “maybe later” pile. They either prove themselves or fail fast.
Each perspective catches what the others miss. Together, they create organisational peripheral vision; the ability to spot threats and opportunities before they’re obvious.
The Real-Time Revolution
Here’s where it gets practical. The gap between “something happened” and “we know about it” is collapsing. Technologies that seemed futuristic three years ago are now table stakes.
Real-time data sharing between retailers and farmers makes supply chains more resilient. It’s like having weather radar for your business, you see storms forming before they hit. According to a 2024 McKinsey study on supply chain resilience, companies using real-time visibility platforms reduced disruption response times by 60%.
But technology alone won’t save you. The smartest companies combine digital tools with human networks. They crowdsource insights from customers, drivers, frontline staff; anyone who sees what’s happening on the ground before it shows up in official reports.
A supermarket chain in Kenya started asking customers to text when essentials were missing from shelves. Simple, low-tech, powerful. They spotted supply issues days before their sophisticated inventory systems registered the problem.
The risk? Misinformation, fake signals, spam.
The solution? Trust networks with light moderation and small rewards for accurate, timely information. Make it easy to contribute, and harder to game.
Building Muscle Memory for Crisis
Hospitals run fire drills. Why don’t more businesses rehearse for supply chain failure, cyber-attacks, or sudden regulatory changes?
The companies getting this right treat scenario planning like fitness training. Regular, varied, challenging. A factory might rehearse “what if our biggest supplier fails tomorrow?” A bank might game out “what if our primary payment system goes down for 48 hours?”
Done badly, these exercises become boring box-ticking. Done well, they build organisational muscle memory. When crisis hits, teams don’t freeze; they execute patterns they’ve practised.
The key is making drills meaningful. Let every role lead a scenario once. Mix teams. Create real stakes (even if simulated). Celebrate clever improvisation, not just following the script.
The Trust Paradox
An uncomfortable truth:
In an era of radical uncertainty, transparency is your best defence and your biggest vulnerability.
Customers, regulators, and employees increasingly demand to know how decisions get made especially when AI is involved. The European Union’s AI Act, implemented in 2024, explicitly requires explainability for high-risk AI systems. Banks must show how loan algorithms work. Retailers need to justify dynamic pricing. Being vague or secretive invites backlash.
Yet radical transparency requires courage. It means admitting you don’t have all the answers, explaining your reasoning even when it’s messy, and accepting public scrutiny of your choices.
Companies that get this right appoint what you might call a “Chief Explainer”; someone whose job is translating complex decisions into plain language. Not spin, not marketing. Honest explanation of trade-offs, constraints, and reasoning.
What is the payoff? When crisis hits, people give you the benefit of the doubt because you’ve built trust by being straight with them.
Strange Bedfellows and Bold Partnerships
Radical uncertainty creates unlikely alliances. Supermarkets partnering with food banks. Petrol stations sharing energy storage with local clinics during blackouts. Competitors co-developing tools to fight common threats.
These partnerships sound lovely in theory but founder on turf wars and rivalry in practice. The companies making them work celebrate cross-organisation wins publicly, run share-and-learn sessions, and reward collaboration as much as competition.
A recent Harvard Business Review case study documented how rivals in the pharmaceutical sector shared manufacturing capacity during the pandemic; something unthinkable before 2020. That collaboration muscle, once built, doesn’t disappear. According to the World Trade Organization’s 2024 report on trade cooperation, cross-industry partnerships increased 40% since 2020, driven largely by shared exposure to disruption.
Your fiercest competitor might hold your lifeline when the next crisis hits. Building those relationships before you need them isn’t soft thinking, it’s survival strategy.
What This Means for You Tomorrow
Stop waiting for certainty that won’t arrive. Start building adaptive capacity today:
Cross-train your teams. The “jack of all trades, master of none” fear is overblown. Banking staff who understand both tech and customer service help when systems fail. Clinic workers who can shift between departments respond faster in emergencies. Start small. Try “task force days” where people swap roles.
Flatten your decision-making. Distributed leadership isn’t trendy jargon; it’s practical resilience. When crisis hits, you can’t wait for head office approval. Empower teams to act, then align.
Make scenario planning a rhythm, not an event. Monthly “what if” sessions beat annual strategic retreats. Keep them short, sharp, and grounded in real possibilities.
Build your sensing network. Who sees the future first in your organisation? Probably not the executives. Listen to frontline staff, customers, suppliers. Basically anyone close to where change happens.
Ditch perfect for fast. In radical uncertainty, the best plan executed quickly beats the perfect plan that arrives late. Reward smart experiments that fail fast over slow deliberation.
The Courage Question
None of this is easy. It requires abandoning the comfortable illusion of control, admitting uncertainty, and trusting your team’s collective intelligence over individual genius.
The bureaucratic alternative of endless meetings, risk committees, approval chains, feels safer. It isn’t. While you’re waiting for consensus, the world moves. Competitors adapt. Opportunities vanish. Threats multiply.
The organisations that will own the next decade are those brave enough to embrace not-knowing, curious enough to keep learning, and connected enough to sense change early. They build trust through transparency, resilience through practice, and advantage through adaptation.
Your five-year plan probably won’t survive next Tuesday. But if you’ve built the right reflexes, the right culture, and the right sensing networks, you won’t need it to.
Ready to Build Your Scenario Muscles?
Navigating radical uncertainty requires more than good intentions. It needs the right tools and frameworks. PreEmpt.Life helps organisations develop adaptive scenario planning capabilities, build sensing networks, and translate uncertainty into strategic advantage. Because the future belongs not to those who predict it best, but to those who adapt fastest.
Explore how scenario planning can transform your strategic readiness at: https://www.preempt.life
Sources & Citations
European Union. (2024). EU Artificial Intelligence Act: Regulatory Framework. https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/regulatory-framework-ai
Harvard Business Review. (2023). How Competitors Collaborated During Crisis. https://hbr.org/
International Monetary Fund. (2024). World Economic Outlook: October 2024. https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WEO
McKinsey & Company. (2024). Building Supply Chain Resilience Through Real-Time Visibility. https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/operations/our-insights
OECD. (2024). Strategic Foresight and Risk Assessment Framework. https://www.oecd.org/strategic-foresight/
World Economic Forum. (2023). Future of Jobs Report 2023. https://www.weforum.org/reports/the-future-of-jobs-report-2023
World Trade Organization. (2024). World Trade Report 2024: Re-globalization for a Secure, Inclusive and Sustainable Future. https://www.wto.org/english/res_e/publications_e/wtr24_e.htm