Embracing Uncertainty: What Artists Teach Us About Strategy, Risk and the Future
In an age obsessed with prediction, control, and efficiency, Margaret Heffernan's Embracing Uncertainty: How Writers, Musicians and Artists Thrive in an Unpredictable World arrives as a timely, and necessary, intervention. The former CEO, author, and professor of practice at the University of Bath makes a compelling case that artists, not economists or executives, hold the key to navigating the radically uncertain future we now inhabit.
The book is not just an ode to creativity. It is a call to rethink our foundational assumptions about how progress is made, how knowledge is developed, and how decisions are best taken in complex, fast-changing environments.
Embracing Uncertainty resonates strongly with critiques of Enlightenment rationality and echoes the ideas of John Kay and Mervyn King in Radical Uncertainty, Henry Mintzberg’s work on emergent strategy, and Paul Barnett’s philosophical argument for a "New Enlightenment" that embraces other ways of knowing, being, and doing.
Heffernan builds her argument through vivid storytelling. Drawing on interviews with artists across disciplines, filmmakers like Mike Leigh, writers such as Sebastian Barry, musicians like Miles Davis, she shows how the creative process thrives not despite uncertainty, but because of it.
Artists do not wait for clarity to act. Instead, they begin with what they have: an instinct, a phrase, a feeling, or a fragment of an idea. They work with incomplete information, and often without a plan, trusting in the emergence of form through action. This, Heffernan argues, is precisely the mindset we need today.
This creative mode of engaging with the world aligns with what John Kay and Mervyn King term "radical uncertainty": situations in which outcomes are not only unknown, but unknowable.
In their book, Kay and King argue that attempts to model such situations mathematically, through probabilities and expected utility, are doomed to fail. Instead, they call for a return to what they term "decision-making under narrative": interpreting evolving situations through stories, judgment, and context.
Heffernan's artists live exactly this reality. Take Mike Leigh, who insists on long periods of apparent inactivity between films, explaining, "Nothing happening is something happening." Or Olga Tokarczuk, who didn't know the ending of her murder mystery until two-thirds of the way through.
These creators embody the principle that knowledge and insight emerge through the process of doing, not planning. This is obliquity in practice.
John Kay’s earlier book, Obliquity: Why our goals are best achieved indirectly, makes this point directly: in complex systems, our goals are often best achieved indirectly. We do not discover great music, build sustainable companies, or solve climate change through top-down plans. We get there obliquely—by pursuing purpose, curiosity, and responsiveness to feedback.
Heffernan's portrait of artists supports this thesis. Their work often begins with a question, not an answer. Their success emerges not from detailed strategies but from sustained, open-ended engagement.
This dovetails with Henry Mintzberg’s seminal concept of "emergent strategy." Unlike deliberate strategy, which assumes clear objectives and rational planning, emergent strategy arises organically from action, experimentation, and learning.
Mintzberg’s critique of traditional strategic planning rests on its detachment from real life. In reality, he says, strategies are discovered in hindsight. They evolve through ongoing interaction with the world.
Embracing Uncertainty can be read as a gallery of emergent strategists. Peter Flannery worked on his series Our Friends in the North for over a decade, enduring rejection and revision, without any guarantee it would be made—let alone become a landmark of British television.
Miles Davis recorded Kind of Blue in two days, with musicians who had never played together, and with no fixed outcome in mind. The result? The most celebrated jazz album of all time.
These stories illustrate Mintzberg’s argument: action leads to strategy, not the other way around.
Heffernan also critiques the systems that stifle this kind of emergence. She decries how educational institutions, obsessed with exams and metrics, have hollowed out arts education, despite evidence that creativity enhances all forms of learning.
Participation in arts subjects has declined by 40%; state support for creative subjects has dropped dramatically. And yet, as Heffernan reminds us, the World Economic Forum now identifies creative and critical thinking as the most vital future skills.
This paradox, neglecting precisely the capacities we need most, extends to organizations as well.
In her RSA presentation, Heffernan noted that too many businesses are enamored with AI not as a creative collaborator, but as a cost-cutting tool. Leaders are "more excited by how many people they can get rid of than by how many new ideas they can discover." This instrumental mindset, a product of the machine age that the Enlightenment most people are familiar with sparked, reveals a failure to grasp the logic of creativity, which is exploratory, inefficient, and uncertain by nature.
That Enlightenment has been called the Moderate Enlightenment and contrasts with the less well known Radical Enlightenment. The latter was more open to the arts, imagination, and other cultures. It that sense it had more in common with the New Enlightenment Paul Barnett is calling for, and sits more comfortably with the ideas expressed by Heffernan.
Getting back to uncertainty, the costs of ignoring it are not abstract. Heffernan, like Kay and King, warns that reliance on predictive models can lead to catastrophic misjudgments. The 2008 financial crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the geopolitical instability of the 2020s are not anomalies; they are the reality of our world.
The key message is that we persist in seeking control where we should seek capacity, in trying to be right, rather than resilient.
This brings us to Barnett’s philosophical framing of the challenge. In his recent article "Beyond Reason: Why We Need a New Enlightenment," Barnett critiques the dominant legacy of the 18th century Enlightenment, the notion that reason alone can deliver human progress.
Barnett proposes a richer, pluralistic vision, where reason is complemented by other forms of knowing: intuition, emotion, embodiment, and relational wisdom. He argues that the Enlightenment worldview is insufficient for today’s deeply interwoven crises. We must develop new ways of being and doing that integrate systems thinking, ecological consciousness, and cultural intelligence.
Heffernan’s case for artistic sensibility is a vivid expression of this New Enlightenment. The artists she interviews do not merely make work; they explore meaning, relationships, atmosphere, and affect. Their practices reveal a reality that is fluid, co-created, and deeply contingent. It is in this spirit that Barnett calls for a “more modest, relational, and participatory” form of knowledge, a view that challenges the Enlightenment’s individualism and certainties.
Barnett’s call for other ways of knowing also invites a broader view of leadership and citizenship. We must unlearn the habits of command and control and cultivate a capacity for deep listening, collective insight, and iterative experimentation.
This is not only true for political or business leaders, but for all of us as social beings. Our futures will be shaped less by those who claim mastery and more by those who embrace interdependence and humility.
Heffernan models this beautifully in her prose and persona. In interviews, she describes her own career as a long series of explorations, across media, tech, teaching, and writing, each shaped not by certainty but by curiosity. Her voice is candid, empathetic, and incisive.
She argues not for grand theories, but for grounded practices: wandering, reflecting, waiting, daring to begin without knowing the outcome. This is not managerial jargon. It is moral and philosophical realism.
As Barnett writes, we need a new kind of Enlightenment that “does not just expand the reach of reason, but reorients it, toward regeneration, participation, and meaning.”
Heffernan’s book is a powerful step in that direction. It reminds us that uncertainty is not something to be conquered but lived with - creatively, collectively, and courageously.
In the end, Embracing Uncertainty is not merely about creativity. It is about truth. It challenges the illusion that we can reduce the world to models and manage it through plans. It invites us to see that life is not a problem to be solved but a mystery to be engaged. And it urges us to develop the inner and collective capacity to face this mystery not with fear, but with imagination and with passion.
As we face ecological collapse, political volatility, and technological upheaval, we need more than plans. We need people who can improvise, adapt, and imagine. Margaret Heffernan reminds us that artists have been doing this all along. We should start paying attention.
Embracing Uncertainty: How Writers, Musicians and Artists Thrive in an Unpredictable World by Margaret Heffernan is published by Bristol University Press. For readers of Kay, King, Mintzberg, and Barnett, it provides a vital companion piece, and a blueprint for a more imaginative and resilient future.
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Very well deserved - such rich thinking