How to Tap into the Creative Energy of Uncertainty

We’ve been trained to treat uncertainty like a bug in the system — something we can fix with enough information.

And why wouldn’t we? We live in an age where answers are always just a search away. Google processes 8.5 billion searches a day, or one for every person on the planet. When we want to know something, we look it up. The information revolution has made ignorance optional.

But what happens when we try to Google the future?

Try it. Type in: “What’s going to happen tomorrow?”

You might get a weather forecast. Or a horoscope. If Google’s AI assistant thinks it can answer you directly, it might offer something poetic like: “No one can predict exactly what will happen, as it is a new day with its own unfolding events.”

Fair enough. But revealing, isn’t it? We’ve built AI trained on the entire internet and wired it into real-time data streams, and still the best we can do is guess.

Because the future isn’t an information problem. It’s an imagination problem.

We’ve become data fanatics, hiring data scientists, building data lakes, driving decisions with dashboards. There’s power in that, no doubt. But there’s also a trap.

The more we rely on data to guide us, the more we assume it can reduce our uncertainty. But data, by definition, is backwards-facing. It tells us what has happened, not what might. And in periods of rapid change, that’s a limitation we can’t afford to ignore.

Wars break out. Technologies leap forward. Whole industries pivot. None of it was predicted with precision. Not because the data was bad, but because the future doesn’t run on data. It runs on possibility.

Which means we need something else.

How Imagination Solves Uncertainty

If the Information Mindset is about knowing more, the Imagination Mindset is about thinking differently. It asks “what if?” instead of “what is?”

And that shift is more than philosophical — it’s practical.

Take the story of Ugur Sahin, the founder of BioNTech. In January 2020, he read an early report about a new virus emerging in China. The data was sparse, but he did some rough calculations. His conclusion: this could kill hundreds of thousands.

He had no certainty. No proof. Just an unsettling sense of what might come next.

Now here’s the fork in the road. He could have waited for more data. Looked for validation. Shrugged and hoped it would blow over.

Instead, he imagined a different future — and acted on it.

Sahin was developing a new mRNA technology to fight cancer. What if, he wondered, that same approach could train the immune system to fight this virus?

Fast-forward less than a year. On 8 December 2020, a 90-year-old woman in Coventry became the first person in the world to receive a fully approved COVID-19 vaccine — developed by Sahin’s company.

This wasn’t a triumph of information. It was a triumph of imagination under pressure.

A Simple Technique to Unlock New Ideas

Most people and organisations don’t struggle with analysis. They struggle with vision.

That’s where the Two Rooms Technique comes in. It’s a simple mental model to help teams shift from reacting to imagining:

1. The Dreamer Room – This is where imagination runs free. No judgement, no constraints. Ask: What if? What new problems are emerging? What wild ideas might solve them? This room is messy and optimistic by design.

2. The Critic Room – Only after the ideas are out do we shift to critique. Ask: Why not? What could go wrong? What’s feasible? What’s worth developing further?

   
   

Most teams skip the Dreamer Room entirely. They try to innovate with the brakes on, letting the critic show up before the ideas have even warmed up.

But innovation requires space — and not just physical space, but mental and temporal space. Time away from inboxes. Environments that cue fresh thinking. Challenges that stretch people’s perspectives. Some companies build this into their culture with hack weeks, off-sites, or 20% time.

You don’t need a big budget. You just need the courage to protect time for unstructured thought.

Reframing Uncertainty as a Creative Trigger

With an Information Mindset, uncertainty feels like failure. It’s something to minimise or ignore.

With an Imagination Mindset, uncertainty becomes fuel. It jolts us out of routine. It sparks questions, opens possibilities, and makes room for ideas that wouldn’t have surfaced in safer, more predictable conditions.

We can’t Google the future. But we can imagine it.

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