The uncertainty principle: how a strong culture and values can help businesses prepare for the unknown

To live in 2025 is to live with uncertainty. AI, tech and climate change are all affecting how we do business – and creating market and geopolitical uncertainty. But how do we build resilient organisations while still staying true to our business’s values?

As educators, we need to give our students the tools and techniques to manage uncertainty – principally collaboration and being able to think effectively. For example, how do you think through making decisions? Part of it is technical – you need business and data analytics, you need to understand finance and operations, so you can harness your information.

But resilience is really about people – if you can’t predict what’s going to happen, you have to adapt, so you need to bring teams together and empower them to make decisions. If you’re always waiting for the top down decision, the world will pass you by. You need to be able to respond in real time. 

This means your overarching strategic plan may be quickly out of date, so what sits under it? Culture and values. You have to bring people together in a culture. Values are easy when things are going well but you need to be able to stand by them when things get tough. I would say culture beats strategy every time.

The traditional view of businesses is that they are there to make money and maximise value for shareholders, but I think we are moving towards an idea of a more sustainable prosperity: the idea that businesses need to generate wealth for society, and provide opportunities for advancement for a wider group of people. This means harnessing equality and diversity. For example, at Imperial we have students from around 150 countries – every time we get more diverse, we get better. If you want to innovate, you need different perspectives and different approaches. Increasingly I’m hearing students say they want to create a job, not look for one.

I’m hearing more students say they want to create a job, not look for one

So does this require a different kind of teaching? We’re building in project-based, experiential learning on top of the deeper learning of the classroom, but mainly it’s about providing opportunities for students to come together. Take the Enterprise Lab, where we use structured, theoretical frameworks to gather people from different backgrounds and disciplines to see what they can build together. It’s not just about business education, it’s about exposure to the science at Imperial and seeing where we can add value, encouraging questions that might help avoid unintended consequences.

What we are looking for are well-rounded students on the technical and business side, so we are planning more combined undergrad courses, but building resilience is also about ongoing learning, so executive education and online courses are important.

I’d say my own approach to strategy is ‘convergent’. Since I joined Imperial, I’ve been talking to people and looking for the thematic crossovers – climate change and healthcare are prime examples. It’s not necessarily about bringing in new things, it’s about harnessing strengths we already have, making sure we’re structuring activities and academic programmes around the themes. As is making sure data science is at the heart of our courses – information is the core of research after all, and education is all about harnessing information to enable an effective response to whatever happens tomorrow.

Professor Peter Todd joined Imperial Business School as Dean in September 2024.