Uncharted

How to Navigate the Future

By: Margaret Heffernan

Narrated by: Margaret Heffernan

“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.

Critic reviews

"Entrepreneur, author, and management professor Margaret Heffernan is a naturally confident speaker, but her assertive delivery never upstages the power and flow of her thinking. Her crowd-pleasing performance is perfect for the kind of clever observations and intellectual sound bites that populate this guide to the unpredictable future. Yet the audio goes well beyond entertainment because, with her solid background in management science, it offers a highly useful guide to where civilization might be headed. Get ready, she says, for a world far more unpredictable than the experts want us to believe. Citing past economic predictions that have repeatedly been wrong, she promotes the skepticism, tolerance for ambiguity, and can-do spirit you'll need to keep your sanity in the unstable times ahead."

the relevance of the information

I liked the stories that supported the topics. Sometimes the topics were hard to follow.

Too many examples for the same thing

From the start it seemed like the book tried to tell me what I already knew, but I kept listening to see if there is anything else that I am missing. In the part two I got exhausted of countless examples that models are not 100% accurate and that the sales pitch often is hiding the downsides of the product. It was interesting to learn about those new examples because I did not know several of them, but that was about it. I have always believed that predictive models do not have to be accurate, it is fine if they're useful (and not used in harmful way), I was waiting if the book will change my mind but it kept just brining more examples of what is bad with all the new developments that are happening.

Excellent depth of thought and research

There's just a ton to consider here - a wide range of stories from industry to religion to the edge of research and the heart of society that tell us that preparedness is far more potent than prediction. Great read for anyone concerned about our future.

Nice ideas, too much fluff

It turned into a struggle to finish this bloated book with some nice central ideas. 30mins and 20 pages would have been enough for the beef of this book. Instead, the whole world history is dragged in to make some points that were clear after a few sentences already.

Bravo!

This book challenges and inspires me. Another powerful set of insights from Margaret Heffernan! I can't wait to read more.