Things we took for granted are changing in front of our eyes. We don’t know what headline we’re going to wake up to. We don’t know what will happen next week, let alone next year.

It can be hard to know how to respond to such mind-bending uncertainty. The good news is that people have been trying to work this out for a while.  In his 1969 essay, 'The World of Tomorrow and the Person of Tomorrow', the psychologist Carl Rogers looked ahead to the volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA) world we inhabit today. He suggested that living in such a world would require a whole new set of competencies – demonstrated already by the ‘persons of tomorrow’ he saw around him even then.

We’ve both tackling big societal problems for decades and part of that has involved learning how to navigate uncertainty. One of the things we discovered was that whilst lots of complexity experts were developing interesting ideas about this, much of it felt inaccessible.

We wanted to make these ideas available to more people, because in the 21st Century, all of us need to know how to navigate uncertainty.

One book that did open up complexity thinking was Dancing at the Edge,  by Graham Leicester and Maureen o’Hara. It picks up on Carl Rogers’ work and explores the behaviours and competencies required to deal with challenges that the 21st Century is throwing at us. 

Both of us had this huge feeling of relief and recognition when we read Dancing at the Edge. It was like someone had seen all the ‘weird’ things we did to move forward through uncertainty. Reading the book made us feel a lot less weird and more confident in the ways of thinking and behaving we’d developed to help navigate uncertainty.  We’ve taken inspiration from Graham & Maureen, mixed it with our own experience and crystalised it all into Uncertain Times. 

We hope these tools will be useful. We hope they will make you feel less weird as you navigate uncertainty. 

Ella & Cassie