1. Anticipating all possible risks is preferable to forecasting them - Think of risk the way the State of California thinks of earthquakes. Buildings are designed to withstand earthquakes that may not occur for a century or more. Many other such earthquake safety measures are instituted. And all that is done for something that may not happen.  As Nassim Taleb says, "Invest in preparedness, not in prediction." That gets to the heart of it.

• Risk is dangerous when you think it requires a specific forecast before you start preparing for it. 
• It's better to have expectations that risk will arrive, though you don't know when or where, than to rely exclusively on forecasts almost all of which are either nonsense or about things that are well-known. 

1. Real serious risks are those we can’t see - Realize that if you're preparing only for the risks you can envision, you'll be unprepared for the risks you can't see every single time. Your preparation may not make sense in a world where the biggest historical events would have sounded absurd before they happened. Yet preparation is the key to living through uncertainty 

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Idea 2 - Assess What is Certain in a Sea of Uncertainties: Cynthia Selin in MIT Sloan Management Review 

The Winter 2026 issue of MIT Sloan Management Review themed around The Uncertainty Opportunity. features an article by Cynthia Selin, Strategy Consultant and associate fellow in University of Oxford’s Said Business School which argues that strategizing in an uncertain environment requires both anticipating what may change and recognizing what will remain constant. 

Select nuggets from the article, highlighting this approach to coping with uncertainty together with our suggestions on how they connect to sales and service:

• Strategic acumen lies not only in anticipating what will change but in recognising what won’t
• People tend to overfocus on uncertainties and gloss over certainties 
• Certainties are “pre-determined elements” that are already in motion and likely to unfold regardless of other uncertainties 
• Knowing what you can count on is as important as navigating what is messy and in flux 
• Certainties can be understood as boundary conditions, which set limits on what is possible in the fact of uncertainty 

5 Lenses of Certainty are: 

1. Material and Physical – Available infrastructure, location, natural resources are examples 
2. Knowledge and expert driven – Institutional knowledge, expertise of employees can be counted here 
3. Temporal and path dependent – Business models adopted, technology and processes deployed are instances of past influencing present and future. Here temporal refers to time and these certainties set the enterprise on path that is not easy to change   
4. Political and economic – Even when external or oversea geopolitical upheavals can bring uncertainty, local regulations, policies and markets usually present certainties that can be relied upon for scenario planning 
5. Normative and cultural – Organisational values, ethos and culture come under these certainties. If Customer intimacy defines a company, it is something of a given even in the midst of uncertainties. Hotels known for the guest centricity continued to put their guests first even during the pandemic

• The goal is to identify certainties relevant to the decision on hand
• Some certainties need to be defended. Some may have to be dismantled 
• Strategic failure is often the result of misjudging what’s fixed and what’s flexible, assuming freedom where there are constraints or imagining rigidity where adaptation is possible 

Where to apply this framework

In a sales context, this framework can be extremely valuable in taking strategic decisions such as expansion of territory, increasing the headcount, investing in sales tech or even in scaling down coverage areas or pruning the product portfolio, especially when the business environment is riddled with uncertainty