The Upside of Uncertainty: A Guide to Finding Possibility in the Unknown

The search for certainty in a world of uncertainty is a human quest. We all long for absolutes, action and reaction, and neat cause-and-effect relationships where A inexorably leads to B. In our approximations and PowerPoint decks, one variable produces one result, in a straight line. There are no curves or fractions to muddy the waters. But the re

while it is essential to cultivate safety, certainty is actually something that should be actively avoided. Certainty is actually a rather rigid state in which creativity and agency cannot exist. ‘If we can become less certain, we are more likely to become receptive to other possibilities, other meanings,’ Mason writes.104 The key is to cultivate s

Perhaps the greatest “phase transition” in our thinking that such an approach could engender is the maturation in our willingness to live with relatively high levels of uncertainty in the domains of complex phenomena—and thus give up on ideas like complete “cures,” the elimination of “risk,” the design of perfect “stability,” and achieving total “s

Welcome to the future, babies. It's not always going to be like this, but we can expect the highs to be higher, and the lows to be lower. Which brings us to the central premise of this book: how can we position ourselves to not only survive this kind of uncertainty, but profit from it?