In this segment of the talk, Charlotte Kemp argues that traditional leadership approaches rooted in certainty, past experience, and fixed strategies are insufficient in today’s rapidly changing environment. She explains that the brain’s innate craving for certainty creates a bias toward familiar, safe choices, which hampers the ability to imagine and explore alternative futures. To navigate volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity, she references several acronyms—VUCA, BANI, TUNA—and introduces a new, humor‑laden one. Kemp stresses that corporate boards often reject imaginative, possibility‑focused thinking because they demand concrete data. She calls for leaders to deliberately hold multiple potential futures in mind, develop imagination, and adopt a model that balances certainty with exploratory thinking, enabling better decision‑making amid pervasive uncertainty.
Chapters
So the second thing we're going to explore is how to hold multiple potential futures in our brains at the same time. The old structures that we have, the world that we worked in, the way a lot of people still wish the world worked in or pretend that the world is this way. We have certainty, we have known facts, we have a strategy that we're trying to execute on, and we have the experience of the past, and all of that should allow us to make good decisions about the future. It doesn't because of all of the change that is happening, because of the nature of the change and the pace of the change. So what we experience instead is uncertainty. There's so many unknowns. Rather than strategy, we have to actually explore possibility, and rather experience, we have to actually develop imagination. And corporate boards aren't big fans of possibility and imagination. It's like, no, where are the facts and the reports and the data? So we need to, we need to kind of embrace these ideas and learn how to use them as leaders. This leans heavily obviously on the concepts of VUCA, which is about— it's an acronym to describe the world as volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous. There's BANI, which is brittle, anxious, nonlinear, and incomprehensible. There's TUNA, which is turbulent, uncertain, novel and ambiguous. There's a whole lot of others as well. I made up one as well, but it spells out a swear word, so you'll have to ask me for that in private. Our brains crave certainty. We need that relief. We need to come back to something. Our brains are designed to keep us safe, not to keep us happy or entertained, not for the best outcome in the future, but to keep us safe in the immediate. So So we crave that certainty. We want to know what happens, but we have to actually be able to think about things that are different, that are alternative. So here is the model that I would like to invite you to consider.
