Margaret Heffernan has spent decades teaching organizations how to look ahead. The key today, she says, is acknowledging the reality of where we are.

British philosopher Bertrand Russell was fond of a story about chickens. Every day the sun rose; as it did the chicken would awake, go outside, crow and be fed. Because the same pattern repeated daily, there was no reason for the chicken ever to expect anything different. And yet one day, the sun rose, the chicken went outside to crow and the farmer wrang its neck. We, Russell implied, are like the chicken, always assuming that what has been, will be. But, he asked, have we any real reason for believing in what he called the uniformity of nature? The best we can ever hope, he argued, are probabilities, not certainty.

It's a tough lesson. Yet if we thought about it, we'd recognize just how much of our lives, from the banal to the profound, is uncertain: catching a bus, a plane, paying off the mortgage, whether a business can keep growing, how long life on Earth will continue. The pandemic and wars in Ukraine and Gaza, each rippling with unforeseen consequences, sensitized us to the unpredictability of life but what they haven't done is shown us how to live with them.

Instead, ever since the Industrial Revolution, the three-legged stool of management has purported to provide certainty. Forecast, plan, execute is the process all business leaders use, hoping for ever greater accuracy at all three stages. The advent of just-in-time planning cut margins wafer thin and efficiency optimized execution. But forecasting hasn't delivered improvements at the same scale. Instead, the window for accurate prediction has shrunk; if you are very meticulous, always framing forecasts with end dates and probabilities and adjusting forecasts in the light of new information gleaned from a broad variety of information sources, the furthest out you are likely to see is, at most, around 400 days. If you are less rigorous, it's closer to 150 days. Even then, the most scrupulous of forecasters acknowledge that surprises remain inevitable and ambiguous: Wars, epidemics, financial crises are certain, but we still don't know where or when they will start or what will set them off. The uncertainty of today's world leaves executives more perplexed than Russell's chicken but with dangerously similar expectations.

Many simply hanker for a return to normal, pinning their hopes on miraculous change: an election, a new CEO, a new technology. Others double down on what they hope are eternal verities: efficiency, restructuring, cost-cutting, short-termism. Most continue to conceive of organizations as machines, rather than what the word suggests: living organisms. In their search for control, few are grasping the need or demonstrating the capacity for a new mindset.

How should we respond to these changing circumstances? The first step is to acknowledge the reality of where we are. If you know you can't know in advance exactly what will happen, build in generous margins. On the day that the Olympics opened in Paris, I couldn't travel from London to Milan by train and arrive punctually without scheduling big gaps; this was inefficient but gave me flexibility to change my route. Adaptability, not control, is the critical dynamic for surviving uncertainty.

Where the old world optimized for efficiency, a complex one demands optionality. That's why many organizations now talk about just-in-case as a counterbalance to the exigencies of just-in-time.  When you're certain, planning can be tight – but when you're not, hang loose.

Not knowing what the future holds requires constant experimentation. Move toward pain points, asking: How might this work better? Then try it. All experiments will reveal parts of your system you didn't understand. The Dutch health care system Buurtzorg radically improved home care nursing by automating much of its back office but also liberating its nursing staff from schedules. With no greater instruction than to "do what was best for its patients," the experiment cut the cost of home care nursing by 33% – because patients got better in half the time. When I asked the experiment's author, Jos de Blok, what most surprised him, he said he had never imagined so vast an improvement could be so easy. You would never achieve this result tweaking numbers on a spreadsheet.

Scenario planning has made a welcome return to management thinking. It integrates large amounts of hard and soft data to create three or four plausible scenarios of what the future might look like. The question for each is: If this became real, what would we wish we had been doing now? This generates lots of options, and not everyone is up for the pervasive debate that characterizes scenario planning at its best. Senior executives, in particular, are often poor at it. I've seen them paralyzed, too daunted by the fragility of their realities to imagine anything different. Better contributors are often enthusiastic players of computer games. Why? Because that's what a game is – an opportunity to play with options – and the creative awareness of what could happen is its pleasure.

Andy Haldane, the former chief economist at the Bank of England, has argued that times of uncertainty demand a greater appetite for risk. And in seeking to avoid it, he argues, governments and business leaders amplify it. This too speaks to getting ahead of problems, not getting distracted by their minutiae. Accelerate out of it.

All of this requires imaginative minds that constantly question the status quo and are skeptical of simple binaries. Our greatest problem currently is that those minds are so hard to find. Many executive teams I work with complain that their people lack creative and critical thinking. They aren't wrong to do so. Brought up in education systems that prioritized giving the right answers over an original thought, and management systems designed for the obedient satisfaction of KPIs and targets, independent thinking is not the hallmark of the rising generation. This must change fast.

Nearly 10 years ago, Singapore's government argued that the rote teaching which had brought 50 years of prosperity to its country would not be adequate to the next 50 years, so they began to introduce more collaborative and creative work into their schools. It's hard to see that kind of foresight in European, British or American education which marginalizes and disparages the arts and humanities, manufacturing instead obedient and fearful graduates, trained not to think for themselves. That they are then subjected to perverse automated recruitment processes designed to screen out anomalies only ensures that the lucky few who get through won't argue – at a time when their employers need their originality most. 

It's tempting to embrace AI with the hope that this new technology will solve problems we scarcely understand. But beware miracle cures, and their evangelists. While AI shows promise, the central job of leadership, making decisions, hasn't changed. The requirement of a good decision is that it can be explained and understood well enough that even those who don't fully agree can accept it. Its legitimacy derives from who has been involved in making it and their demonstrable expertise in doing so. All of these qualities are elusive – if not opaque – in the usage of AI. That does not mean it is necessarily out of bounds; it does mean that its proposals require scrutiny, debate and the creative capacity to imagine their potential impact. Who benefits? Who gets harmed? What are the trade-offs, short term, long term and where? The power to convene is not a new requirement of leadership, but it is more complex and requires a higher tolerance for debate and ambiguity than ever before.

Above all else, the future demands leaders who are nonideological and multi-modal, who know that in times of uncertainty, to depend on any single process, mindset or personality exacerbates fragility. Because business is, despite its masquerading jargon, all about life, a biological lens can be helpful. Successful organizations will have to develop the adaptive capacity of the human body, which can thrive in a homeostatic mode (balancing the generation and consumption of energy, just-in-time), an anabolic mode (building up more resources than necessary, just-in-case) and a catabolic mode: having the capacity to respond instantly, spending resources faster than they can be immediately replaced. What this might lack in the comforting control of an engineering mindset, it gains from the adaptive reflex that diversity provides.

What's critical is to know what to use when. The pandemic showed that most organizations were okay in a single mode, and occasionally managed a second, but all struggle now to develop and match the mode to the moment. But today we need more options, not fewer, greater imagination, not less. Otherwise, we're left as startled as Russell's chicken, trapped in uniformity, unable to adapt to circumstances we didn't see coming.