Education and training | Harmattan Risk

Global uncertainty - education and training

Sense-making and planning within uncertainty, becoming comfortable with a more ambiguous global context.

Talks and seminars

Tailored talks and seminars on aspects of geopolitical risk, uncertainty, and organisational resilience can provide valuable contextual awareness in away-days, general meetings, and strategy reviews.

A recent example was a presentation and Q&A session about US trade policy under the Trump administration, for a global industry association’s annual conference. The session included how to interpret US policy in the context of hyperbole and Trump’s own eccentric style, and how to become more capable of sensing and adapting to changes in US trade and geostrategic relations.

Course: Managing in Uncertainty

When faced with uncertainty, and lacking approaches to make sense of and manage it, we often:

Procrastinate so we don’t make the wrong move, and hope things return to normal

Overreact to indications of change and overinvest in untested directions
Subconsciously create and adhere to a simple picture of reality, or just ignore change, to reduce decision angst.

Unless we’re very lucky, the eventual result is that the organisation is exposed to factors and forces that we never planned for, and that strategy is premised on false assumptions about the world.

We need to be comfortable with uncertainty. That means seeing the future in terms of hypotheses, synchronising planning with a living intelligence picture, and regarding mistakes or failures as experimental outcomes. We need to perceive the world not as a landscape, but as a living system that defies static description and interpretation. We must be adept at spotting our own biases and thinking habits and account for their effects on our interpretation and judgement. And we need to be able to balance agility with strategic consistency so that we’re not pulled off course by every breeze.

Our two- to three-day course in managing in uncertainty provides concepts, frameworks and practical exercises to help make that transition. Geopolitical uncertainty is our principal frame of reference, but the approaches herein transcend the geopolitical context.