In his 2006 book Science Business, Gary Pisano defined three elements of the business environment that a science- or technology-based business must master to survive: speed of change, complexity, and uncertainty. We've dealt with the first two, speed of change and complexity, in previous col- umns (Spencer 2013, 2014). Uncertainty is perhaps an inevi- table outcome of the other two. In defining uncertainty, we aren't talking about a simple lack of knowledge or probabilis- tic risk. Instead, business uncertainty emerges from inacces- sible data or an unknowable future. Speed of change means that failing to act in the face of uncertainty is not an option; just cutting costs and saving time may optimize the present but it won't create the future. Uncertainty notwithstanding, the business leader must lead.Business uncertainty is the sum of all the unknowns sur- rounding a decision: unknowns about competitors, suppliers, and partners and their intentions; about consumer trends and political and financial shifts; about coming technical changes. There is a rich literature on the topic; Courtney, Kirkland, and Viguere (1997) offer a methodical approach befitting their McKinsey heritage, and of course an entire industry-insurance-is built on one method of managing against an uncertain future.In an uncertain world, the wise manager will envision modes of failure and put plans in place to avert, minimize, or recover from them. Insurance is one form of planning-for- failure. NASA takes this power of negative thinking to an extreme for the sake of astronaut and mission survival in its what-else-can-go-wrong planning (Hadfield 2013). Unless you have a monopoly in a static market, plan for success may be one of the most dangerous mantras in business. But failure mitigation alone is insufficient, and the management of innovation, where uncertainties abound, takes more radi- cal thinking.Strategies Against UncertaintyThere are a host of approaches to managing uncertainty, but they can all be grouped into three general strategies, illus- trated by a personal approach to wet weather:* Buffer: Always keep a raincoat and umbrella in the trunk of the car.* Plan: Listen to the weather forecast and bring a raincoat if the prediction warrants.* Adapt: Do nothing now. If it rains, find an umbrella somewhere, run, or get wet.Which strategy you adopt may depend on elements that are outside your control. If you have slack resources (a car with a big trunk), then you can buffer; this is the approach on which the insurance industry is built (cash today against bad news tomorrow). If you have a reliable model of the future (a weather forecast), then you can plan. If you have neither, then you must adapt because you have no alternative.But it's important to be honest about your capabilities. Science and engineering managers love to build quantitative models to guide planning. The danger is that modeling can take on a life of its own, restrict itself to knowable but minor factors, and mask the ugly reality that a lot of what happens isn't very predictable. In pharmaceuticals, despite years of in- vitro and animal testing and sophisticated computer model- ing, about 90 percent of new drugs fail when they reach human testing (Kola and Landis 2004). The lesson is to be very honest, and if slack resources or good predictive models are lacking (which is common), then accept that your strat- egy must be adaptation.At the strategic level, adaptation means moving from push to pull as defined by Hagel and Brown (Brown and Hagel 2005; Hagel and Brown 2008). Push is intrinsic to the corpo- rate design Alfred Sloan gave us a century ago: do annual data gathering and analysis, make big decisions, then push re- sources at the corporate goals, all nicely managed by individ- ual goals and performance reviews. It's top-down, centralized, and highly structured, and, when you think about it, assumes that the world is predictable on annual timescales. …