If there’s a word of the year for 2026 so far, it’s “uncertainty.” Sure, the same could be said for basically every year this decade. But in the last few months, the uncertainty has only intensified with conflict in the Middle East, worrisome economic data, AI disruptions, and air-travel chaos.
All this uncertainty makes it a stressful time to be a business leader. Today, we hear from Kellogg faculty Matthew Allen and Adam Waytz on dealing with uncertainty—and even embracing it.
Think in decades, not quarters
For many businesses, the future is measured in three-month increments. The quarterly reporting requirement for public companies means prioritizing consistent growth in the near term, lest you suffer a stock dip and a negative narrative shift.
When your time horizon is that short, there’s little room to let disruptions settle and uncertainty abate. So as the stressful headlines stack up, Allen suggests borrowing the “secret weapon” of family-owned businesses: a long-term perspective.
“The point is not to minimize the importance of a business’s current conditions, especially when faced with pressing challenges,” writes Allen, John L. Ward Clinical Professor of Family Enterprises. “However, it is important to understand how a truly long-term view can help you focus on what matters most—the health and sustainability of your business and family—and use that to navigate the storms of the present more effectively.”
As an extreme example, Allen points to the Lee Kum Kee family, which began as a sauces and condiments merchant 138 years ago. In 2022, the business announced a 1,000-year vision for its portfolio, which today includes real estate, venture capital, and philanthropy.
Even if you’re building a less-ambitious long-term time frame, Allen suggests some essential ingredients. Invest in the future, including facilities, technology, equipment, and especially people. Promote purpose and values, because “focusing on and communicating what you value most will help you make decisions that take both current context and longer-term vision into account, for the benefit of all,” he writes.
Leaders should also consider deeper impacts beyond financial performance and focus on their legacy—what they will leave for future generations and how they hope to be remembered.
“Change and disruption are inevitable, and their pace is only accelerating,” writes Allen. “Taking a truly long-term perspective in these uncertain times will help you and your organization focus on what matters most.”
Read more at Inc., and learn more of Allen’s lessons from family businesses at Kellogg Insight.
The danger of certainty
Artificial intelligence technologies are compounding modern uncertainty by undercutting entire industries and putting many types of jobs at risk of replacement. But generative AI tools such as large language models (LLMs) also promise clarity by serving as “explanation generators,” writes Adam Waytz in Templeton Ideas.
Ask Claude or ChatGPT about medical issues or professional challenges, and it will provide a confident answer—though perhaps one with questionable facts or dubious wisdom. The sense of certainty these AI models provide may ultimately limit people’s intellectual curiosity and humility, proposes Waytz, the Morris and Alice Kaplan Professor of Ethics & Decision in Management.
“As LLMs ensure we rarely have to experience being wrong, uncertain, or baffled, we mistakenly feel we have no reason to doubt our own beliefs,” Waytz writes.
His proposal? People should increase their exposure to magic, which Waytz describes as “events that appear to defy physical or scientific causation.” Doing so can be as simple as resisting the urge to optimize every moment and seeking out experiences that resist easy explanation.
“Activities like taking a walk without a destination, talking to strangers, approaching the day without a to-do list, or intentionally reading books that interest us build more serendipity into our lives and critically remind us of the indeterminacy of the world,” Watyz writes.
Waytz also suggests people reduce their fear of uncertainty, taking inspiration from Zen Buddhism, Taoism, and other sacred and secular traditions.
“Across these traditions, treating ‘not knowing’ as an essential virtue becomes liberating, helping us to accept the limits of our own minds and bolstering our humility,” Waytz writes. “By embracing mystery in the face of technological mastery, we can regain intellectual humility that makes us more open to understanding each other.”
Read more in Templeton Ideas.
“That’s not a Chicago issue. That’s a much bigger issue; that’s really, in many ways, sort of a global issue.”
—Timothy Calkins, in Block Club, on large department stores like Saks Fifth Avenue shrinking their footprint as more shopping moves online.
See you next week,
Rob Mitchum, editor in chief
Kellogg Insight