Uncharted

Uncharted How to Navigate the Future

“Excellent (and very timely).” —Financial Times * “Smartly assembled case studies and insights.” —Publishers Weekly * A Financial Times Best Book of the Year Former CEO and popular TED speaker Margaret Heffernan offers powerful and practical tools so you can face the future with confidence and courage. Most of us 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. Tomorrow remains uncharted territory, but Margaret Heffernan demonstrates how we can push aside uncertainty and forge ahead with agility. Drawing on a wide array of people and places, Uncharted traces long-term projects that shrewdly evolved over generations to meet the unpredictable challenges of every new age. Heffernan also looks at radical exercises and experiments that redefined standard practices by embracing different perspectives and testing fresh approaches. Preparing to confront a variable future 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 mine our own creativity and humanity for the capacity to create the futures we want and can believe in.
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Reviews

Photo of matej yangwao
matej yangwao@yangwao
4 stars
Aug 22, 2023

Historical war ruins offers historical inventory to tell us that history doesn't repeat. Thus we better enable to take advantage of it. However history offer rich concepts, ideas &c to see what has happened in the past to them and why. History backwards makes much more sense. Anticipation of fall. Cathedral projects are always successful despite the level of uncertainty they face. They accept uncertainty as motivator. Embrace ambiguity. Artists rather take advantage of complexity than reduce it, because they're aren't afraid of contradictions and paradoxes. Uncertainty will always remain a constant in life.

Photo of Christian Beck
Christian Beck@cmbeck
3 stars
Sep 26, 2021

This book had excellent stories around dealing with uncertainty but the book itself felt wandering and incomplete. It promised to deliver tools to deal with uncertainty but I don’t think it did that well. The premise around our desire for certainty is interesting, and the ways humans have attempted to reduce uncertainty–often poorly–informative. But I think Superforecasting by Philip Tetlock is a much more effective book on the subject.

Photo of Mac Navarro
Mac Navarro@1xmac
3 stars
Mar 1, 2023
Photo of Joan Westenberg
Joan Westenberg@joan
4 stars
Aug 21, 2022

This book appears on the shelf Young adult

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