Posted 24 Nov
Brooke Ferguson 
Vaughn Tan is an independent strategy consultant who works with governments, businesses, and not-for-profits to build effective strategies for adapting to uncertain futures. He is the author of The Uncertainty Mindset (Columbia University Press, 2020), a book about using uncertainty as a strategic tool for designing innovative and adaptable organizations. Vaughn is a Fellow of the Singapore Government Centre for Strategic Futures, an executive board member for Rethink Food in the United States, a founding partner in Dreddge, and Head of Southeast Asia Executive Education for University College London. Previously, he worked for Google in California. He has a PhD in Organizational Behavior and Sociology from Harvard University and Harvard Business School. He joined us in June and August as our Futurist-in-Residence and SA Water Visiting Research Fellow (VRF). Read Vaughn’s reflections on his stay in Adelaide below.
When I was planning my time in Adelaide, I had a neat, three-part plan:
It was a classic, checklist-style plan, full of known actions and a clear timeline.
But my month (actually 2 weeks each in June and August) as a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of South Australia’s future-oriented museum, MOD., reminded me that the most valuable outcome wasn’t checking things off a list. It was concentrating my efforts on a single, vital question: How do we move beyond just talking about uncertainty to actually experiencing it, so that we can learn to manage or even take advantage of it?
The resulting work, two big, interlinked projects and the beginnings of an even bigger one, was far more concrete and impactful than my initial broad ideas. My time in South Australia became a living experiment in the concepts I study.
The foundational error most organisations make is confusing risk with true uncertainty. Risk is quantifiable — you know the odds, like a coin flip. True uncertainty is when you don’t know the possible actions, the potential outcomes, or even how valuable different outcomes might be. Uncertainty is often what paralyses leaders and managers.
My work focused on engineering experiences that force people to confront this genuine uncertainty head-on. This journey began with a deep, cross-disciplinary workshop to investigate mechanisms for experiencing not-knowing on demand. We didn’t just theorise; we designed specific, buildable prototypes. We created ideas like the “camera of not-knowing,” which breaks the usually clear link between taking a photo and how the photo will look, forcing the user to learn how to act without understanding causation fully.
This practical focus made it possible to think practically about building games that operationalise true uncertainty, not just simple risk. You can read more about the practical ideas that came out of that session here.
That work led directly to the public-facing project of my fellowship: FOUNDATION. Built in collaboration with the MOD. team, FOUNDATION is a multiplayer construction game. The premise is simple: Build a foundation for future players to build on. The catch? You don’t know the rules, the materials, or what the previous players left behind. You discover these things only by experimenting. This exhibit literally embodies non-risk not-knowing. It forces players to confront the uncomfortable feeling of not knowing what actions are available and what outcomes will result.
You can read about the exhibit’s design and purpose here.
The second major project was a direct response to a real-world gap: I spent much of the time I was in Adelaide developing a course that is basically a new way to teach public sector strategy. Traditional strategy (and traditional ways of teaching strategy to public servants) fails governments because it borrows concepts, values, and frameworks from the private sector—which is designed for short time horizons and maximising profit. Public sector organisations, however, deal with wicked problems, serve all stakeholders, and operate with indefinite time horizons.
My new course flips the script. It focuses on thinking about strategy as a protocol for coordination in a decentralised hierarchy and, crucially, about making explicit tradeoffs. This approach avoids the catastrophic failures that occur when agencies’ actions collide—the kind of avoidable coordination failures that public sector strategy must solve. (Part of the course development is supported by the Ethereum Foundation’s protocols research programme.)
To make the content relevant, I developed an innovation with parametric cases—teaching scenarios that can be entirely customised to the specific geographical and content of learners. I tested the public sector strategy course with people from the South Australia government and SA Water. Their feedback was that the course was excellent and much needed by their organisations.
I also shared insights developed out of my formal research and refined in application as an independent strategy consultant. Through running two workshops for cross-functional and senior teams at SA Water and delivering a dedicated talk for the leadership team (including the President) of the new Adelaide University. In both cases, the focus was on how understanding the difference between risk and uncertainty is essential for better strategy, and on practical organisational design and process interventions that avoid conflating uncertainty with risk.
This work proved that the course isn’t just possible — it’s desperately needed by organisations facing complex strategic choices right now. You can read more about the course and the innovation of parametric cases here.
Just before the end of my time in Adelaide, I ran a long, exploratory workshop with mathematicians, computer scientists, and statisticians from both UniSA and the University of Adelaide. The goal was to explore how non-risk forms of not-knowing could be represented symbolically in computationally tractable ways. The workshop was exciting in showing several potentially feasible ways forward—which would unlock many new applications in managing the unknown, not to mention in general computation.
Ultimately, my time in Adelaide became a living experiment in the concepts I study. My original broad plan naturally evolved into the deep, concrete work of deploying the FOUNDATION exhibit and testing the public sector strategy course with key South Australian organisations, as well as discovering new directions for foundational research on how to use and represent things we don’t know. Success in an uncertain world isn’t about rigidly following the plan; it’s about building comfort with discomfort, and being ready to abandon the map when you find a clearer path forward.
Find out more about Vaughn’s work here.
Hear from the other Futurist-in-Residence who have participated in the program: