I’m a speaker, consultant, author, toolmaker, and strategy professor at UCL. I’ve spent over a decade researching the difference between risk and| vaughntan.org
What if you could experience what it’s like to make decisions when the actions and outcomes available to you are truly uncertain? That’s what| vaughntan.org
Current AI interfaces lull us into thinking we’re talking to something that can make meaningful judgments about what’s valuable. We’re not — we’re using tools that are tremendously powerful but nonetheless can’t do“meaningmaking” work (the work of deciding what matters, what’s worth pursuing). I developed and tested with first-year undergraduates a pen-and-paper prototype designed to isolate the core mechanisms for thinking critically while using AI tools. Participants used ...| Vaughn Tan
In June, I ran a workshop with 15 researchers from diverse fields to develop practical, implementable mechanisms for experiencing different types of not-knowing firsthand. While we identified some new categories of not-knowing beyond those in my original framework, the real breakthrough was creating concrete prototype ideas — like“the camera of not-knowing” that forces you to take action without understanding the causation between your actions and results. As a group, we developed four ...| Vaughn Tan
tl;dr: Categories aren’t academic conceits—they’re tools that enable more effective practical action. If you care about making AI work in real-world| vaughntan.org
tl;dr: Hidden behind an unmarked doorway in Barcelona, two coffee businesses share the same small space — one roasting and selling, the other teaching and tasting — but not at the same time. This smart setup, which I called a stacked space, cuts costs, spreads downside-exposure, and promotes urban experimentation and innovation. It’s an emerging pattern you can now spot in Singapore, Tokyo, Manhattan, and Paris … and a kind of urban innovation planners and developers haven’t caught ...| Vaughn Tan
We often act like every unknown is just“risk,” but that prevents us from seeing that there are four deeper, non-risk types of not-knowing: About what we can do (actions), what could happen (outcomes), how actions cause outcomes (causation), and what outcomes are actually worth (subjective value). Each type has different sources — and each therefore demands its own way of thinking and acting strategically. Understanding these distinctions doesn’t just help us avoid mistakes; it makes s...| Vaughn Tan
tl;dr: I’m looking for — or would like to build — games that operationalise true uncertainty, not just simple risk, to help players become better at| vaughntan.org
All of the entries posted on Vaughn Tan tagged risk| vaughntan.org
tl;dr: Current LLMs can’t truly or create new knowledge on their own; but they can help humans do that innovation work more quickly. LLMs work best as eager research assistants: good at mapping known landscapes, bad at deciding what matters. So, paradoxically, they’re most useful to people with enough domain expertise to ask good questions and spot flaws — but they leave novices vulnerable to plausible but biased or simply incorrect outputs. If your organisation is deploying AI as a cre...| Vaughn Tan
tl;dr: A futurist friend recently made an expensive, early exit from the Middle East during a flare-up in the Israel-Iran conflict … then felt embarrassed when the situation de-escalated theatrically. That embarrassment stems from misframing the decision as an optimisation problem — which assumes that precise estimation of risks, probabilities, and timings is possible. It wasn’t. The situation wasn’t only risky, it was also uncertain — marked by capricious actors uninterested in pla...| Vaughn Tan
tl;dr: Anthropic’s experiment with using Claude as an autonomous shopkeeper (“Claudius”) failed — not just because the AI was gullible, but because| vaughntan.org
Term 1, 2020/2021; University College London, School of Management Module official page Strategic management consists of managerial actions| vaughntan.org
All of the entries posted on Vaughn Tan tagged meaningmaking| vaughntan.org
tl;dr: Instead of building tools that are designed to generate outputs indistinguishable from human outputs, we should be building AI tools that focus on helping users learn to do meaning-making: The work of making inherently subjective decisions about the subjective and relative value of things. AI companies, businesses, governments, NGOs, and universities are now ploughing ever huger amounts into building AI tools that generate outputs (like passages of text, code, images, audio, and video)...| Vaughn Tan
tl;dr: AI tools are increasingly accessible, cheap, and seem potentially able to produce any output a human can produce — they’ll certainly| vaughntan.org
As I wrote previously, I’m building a course on public sector strategy for public servants. I’ve been hard at work setting up the course structure but I also wanted to more fully articulate its underlying logic and motivation. The structure of an intensive public strategy course. Public strategy isn’t good enough right now Public sector organisations are failing at strategy. Not because they lack smart people or good intentions, but because they’re using the wrong tools for the job. T...| Vaughn Tan
This week I was in Healdsburg hanging around at Edge Esmeralda. Several of the conversations I ended up in were about the conundrums and unsolved| vaughntan.org
Here’s a question that should make every decision-maker uncomfortable: What if the sophisticated risk-management infrastructures we’ve built up aren’t just useless for most of the problems we face — but actively harmful? It isn’t that we’re bad at managing risk. We’ve actually gotten quite good at situations where we know all the possible actions and outcomes, and can assign reliably precise and accurate probabilities to each. Well-run casinos, for example, shouldn’t lose mone...| Vaughn Tan
I’ve been working with two teams at a global economic development agency to clarify and strengthen their offering strategy. One of the most| vaughntan.org
All of the entries posted on Vaughn Tan tagged uncertainty| vaughntan.org
All of the entries posted on Vaughn Tan tagged strategy| vaughntan.org
I’ve been working with governments and international organisations for nearly a decade. In that time, I’ve observed a persistent problem in how the public sector thinks about and does strategy. Dedicated public servants step into strategic leadership roles and are given strategy frameworks and concepts that feel … off. Why do these conventional ways of doing strategy feel off in the public sector? Because the commonplace strategic frameworks originate from empirical studies conducted ma...| Vaughn Tan
I’m just back from 10 stunningly hot days in Bangkok. Water came out of the faucets feeling warmer than blood heat. It was my first time to Thailand other than overnighting in the airport 22 years ago when my connecting flight home was canceled. Bangkok is so good, and its geist reminds me of Marseille. I would like to go back, though perhaps in a cooler time of year. Hua Lamphong (28 April, 2025). The city is sprawling. Its freeways and major roads are thick with traffic during rush hours....| Vaughn Tan
This is #4 in a series on seven tensions that lead to common misunderstandings about strategy. Conventional goal-setting is self-defeating. I’ve| vaughntan.org
There are two types of consulting work. The first type is concrete consulting, which looks legible and accountable, and is clearly scoped from the beginning. Concrete consulting is when the client knows that it needs service X, the consultant is set up to provide service X, and service X is what is scoped and delivered. (For instance, hiring a consultant to evaluate and select a vendor for a new supply chain management system.) Corporate procurement systems are built for the straightforwardn...| Vaughn Tan
tl;dr: Today’s business environment is changing ever more quickly. It’s becoming too unpredictable for conventional planning. How can organisations adapt and innovate when traditional long-cycle planning isn’t good enough anymore? The answer — across governments, established businesses, startups, and NGOs — is to experiment more and do it better. Experimentation is closely associated with product teams and product development — practices like A/B testing, or beta launches, or conv...| Vaughn Tan
Public sector organisations now face unprecedented uncertainty (which is not the same thing as risk). This uncertainty comes from extreme and| vaughntan.org
tl;dr: Interviews can offer deep and valuable insights into uncertain, emerging, and poorly understood situations — but only if you’re rigorous across all 4 phases of the interview lifecycle, each of which calls for different skills. Last year, at coffee, the R&D director of a big CPG brand told me that their team had spent north of $300k on market research surveys and interviews to understand just-emerging patterns of consumer behaviour, shifts that could affect entire product lines. The...| Vaughn Tan
At a recent UNDP event on increasing government efficiency and digitalization, I spoke to representatives across a country’s government about how public institutions can — and should — navigate an increasingly uncertain world. tl;dr: We should not be trying to build hyper-efficient public sector organisations that spend their time making rigid, non-adaptable, long-term plans. What the public sector needs is efficacy (not just efficiency) and non-wasteful slack that can adapt and be rede...| Vaughn Tan
Why do some neighbourhoods or cities have such interesting, diverse, and desirable arts, culture, retail, food and beverage, and other kinds of| vaughntan.org
This is #3 in a series on seven tensions that lead to common misunderstandings about strategy. --- Good strategy understands affect, not just cognition. When doing strategy work, what most often gets emphasised is the highly cognitive stuff: Developing analytical frameworks, collecting data, testing hypotheses. The thinking, cognitive side of strategy-making is crucial. But paying so much attention to the cognitive work of strategy leads us to mistake strategy for being only about cognition. ...| Vaughn Tan
tl;dr: Make it easier and more effective for introducers to make connections for you by writing them specifically structured emails: Forwardable Introduction Requests (FIR).1 In the last two weeks, I’ve been asked for 6 introductions to various people and ended up successfully making 2 of those introductions. For every one of those 6 requests, I’ve liked the person asking and wanted to make the introduction. But the way the askers made these requests was both ineffective for the asker and...| Vaughn Tan
This is #2 in a series on seven tensions that lead to common misunderstandings about strategy. --- Good strategy is embedded, not just abstracted. A misconception about strategy Stripped all the way down, strategy is about making decisions under uncertainty. Strategy requires understanding the current situation — what resources you have, what constraints you face — and deciding where you want to go (which must be both different and better). But the path between where you are and where you...| Vaughn Tan
This is #1 in a series on seven tensions that lead to common misunderstandings about strategy. --- Strategy is not the same as planning The line between strategy and planning (or“strategic planning”) is often blurry in organisations — more on why that is later. But it pays to be very clear about what strategy is and how it is fundamentally different from planning. Planning must come after strategy Planning is selecting and deciding the order of actions in already-interpreted situations,...| Vaughn Tan
There are seven misunderstandings when it comes to strategy, which are all in the diagram above. These misunderstandings are more properly| vaughntan.org
Meaningmaking is a simple concept but one that is counterintuitively powerful in understanding how we think about work and technology in a world| vaughntan.org
Formal risk (which is comfortingly quantifiable and optimisable) is not the same thing as true uncertainty. At this moment, it’s not an exaggeration| vaughntan.org
This is the pre-reading for the 12th episode in a series of conversations exploring how to relate better to not-knowing. tl;dr: A mindset for| vaughntan.org
Goals defined; conventional understanding of business goals in strategy; practical reasons for the prevalence of this understanding; key concepts| vaughntan.org
The latest entries posted on Vaughn Tan| vaughntan.org
All of the entries posted on Vaughn Tan tagged not-knowing| vaughntan.org
This is the reading for the 11th episode in my monthly discussion series on not-knowing. tl;dr: A mindset is a set of assumptions which shape what| vaughntan.org
tl;dr: This article describes open-ended roles and negotiated joining, and gives 4 design principles for implementing them in an organisation. With| vaughntan.org
tl;dr: This post is about five ways we might not-know about the value of outcomes. This is the reading for the eighth episode in my series of| vaughntan.org
tl;dr: This post is about the five ways we might not-know about the relationships between actions and outcomes — in other words, five types of| vaughntan.org
Warning: Ideas and analysis in this post are still being baked. This is the reading for the 22/6/2023 discussion that’s part of my monthly| vaughntan.org
This essay is different from the ones that came before it in this series on aspects of not-knowing. The main difference is that I’m very actively| vaughntan.org
So far, a huge amount of trying to wrap my head around not-knowing has been working on clearing the ground. By this I mean working out how we use| vaughntan.org
This is a summary of the fifth session in the InterIntellect series on not-knowing, which happened on 18 May 2023. Upcoming: “Actions and results,”| vaughntan.org
This article is about the complicated emotional backdrop for why we don’t think clearly about situations of not-knowing. Why does this matter?| vaughntan.org
Most people don’t find thinking about not-knowing as inexhaustibly fascinating as I do. Their view, loosely, is that “if not-knowing is unavoidable,| vaughntan.org
tl;dr: To make good strategic decisions, we need more sophisticated ways of understanding uncertainty. This research project introduces a new| vaughntan.org
I used to co-teach a doctoral course in the methodology of management research. The weeks I taught were about interview methods and ethnography.| vaughntan.org
tl;dr: What it means to be human is (and should be) a moving target. Lots of people are excited that we are on the cusp of building machines that| vaughntan.org
What follows is an introduction to not-knowing (first published in my Substack newsletter), which covers The origin story for the discussion series| vaughntan.org
tl;dr: Happiness results from being curious about the world around you, being free to take action, being effective in the actions that you take, and| vaughntan.org
tl;dr: We’re culturally and socially conditioned to avoid not-knowing or pretend it doesn’t exist. This conditioning is a form of learned| vaughntan.org
tl;dr: We need to be vigilant about mindset mismatch because serious mindset mismatch causes bad decisionmaking which often leads to terrible| vaughntan.org
tl;dr: Mindset mismatch is when the mindset you use to interpret and act in the world inaccurately reflects reality. All mindsets are inaccurate in| vaughntan.org
This article is part of a project on not-knowing. Here is a problem: Organizations (businesses, non-profits, governments, NGOs) know that| vaughntan.org
This article explains why conventional goal-setting is usually self-defeating, and how organizations can free themselves to act more autonomously| vaughntan.org
tl;dr: This article argues that thinking clearly about risk is essential to making good decisions and achieving good outcomes in situations of| vaughntan.org