You're listening to a podcast from the BBC World Service. This is Hard Talk with me, Stephen Sacker.

Thanks for downloading this edition of the program. I do hope you enjoy it.

My guest today hasn't just built her own successful media and business career. She's drawn lessons from her experience and distilled them into a hugely successful series of books

on business and organisational culture. Margaret Heffernan's latest work, uncharted,

how to map the future, addresses our contemporary preoccupation with predictions and forecasts.

To be blunt, Ms Heffernan thinks much of the forecasting we do,

increasingly driven by artificial intelligence and algorithms, is counterproductive,

driven by a misguided effort to find certainty in an uncertain world. It's a message with

particular resonance right now. The global spread of

coronavirus is currently presenting the entire world with unforeseen challenges which have put entire

countries into lockdown and threaten the stability of financial markets. Her critique of

organizational and business culture doesn't even end there. In other work,

she confronts the willful blindness that afflicts many organizations and keeps their failings hidden.

She questions the assumptions that we make about the efficiency of competition. All in all,

is it time we embraced uncertainty and abandoned our desire for control?

Well, Margaret Heffernan joins me now.

Welcome to Hard Talk.

Thank you.

I think we would all like to believe that as human knowledge expands, particularly with technology,

our ability to forecast the future accurately improves.

Is it your contention that that is not true?

It isn't my contention that it isn't true.

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