Welcome to the 71st edition of #theFutureReadyAdvisor Newsletter!
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The Day 900 People Were Trapped on Everest
Just weeks ago, on October 4-5, 2025, Mount Everest delivered a brutal reminder that nature doesn’t care about your plans. Nearly 900 hikers, guides, and support staff found themselves trapped in the Karma Valley on the Tibetan side of the mountain when a freak blizzard dumped over a meter of snow—literally overnight.
This wasn’t amateur hour. These were trekkers with experienced guides during what’s typically the prime hiking season. October in the Himalayas is known for clear skies and manageable conditions after the monsoon ends. Tour groups heading to Everest during China’s Golden Week holiday had been fully booked months in advance.
Then Friday night arrived, and everything changed.
“The guide said he had never encountered such weather in October,” Chen Geshuang, an astrophotographer who survived the ordeal, told reporters. “And it happened all too suddenly.” By Saturday morning, snow reached people’s thighs. Tents collapsed. Hypothermia set in. Lightning cracked across the peaks every minute through the night. People used cooking pots to dig themselves out because they had no proper tools.
One hiker told Chinese media he’d been to the Himalayas more than a dozen times and had never faced conditions this extreme. Another said his group had to shovel snow every ten minutes just to keep their tent from being buried.
These weren’t people who ignored weather forecasts or skipped preparation. They had done everything right according to standard risk management principles. They had guides who knew the terrain. They had proper gear. They had picked the optimal season based on decades of historical data.
What they couldn’t account for was uncertainty—the fundamental unpredictability that no amount of planning can eliminate.
Back in 1996, a similar storm on Everest killed eight climbers in a single day, including experienced guides like Rob Hall and Scott Fischer who knew the mountain intimately. Jon Krakauer’s account in Into Thin Air revealed that many victims had made decisions based on careful risk analysis. They knew the statistics. They understood the dangers. But understanding risk isn’t the same as navigating uncertainty.
The hikers who survived both the 1996 disaster and this October 2025 storm shared a common trait: they recognized when their plans had become obsolete and adapted in real-time. They understood that certainty was an illusion, and survival depended not on sticking to the plan, but on knowing when to abandon it.
The Illusion of Control
We live in an era that promises unprecedented control over our environment. Flip a switch—the lights come on. Turn a tap—hot water flows. Open an app—food appears at your door. Check your weather app—you get a ten-day forecast. This mastery over daily life creates a dangerous cognitive bias. We begin to believe we can control far more than we actually can.
As leaders and decision makers, we’re particularly vulnerable to this illusion. Our success often comes from our ability to analyze, plan, and execute. We build sophisticated models, create detailed strategies, and develop contingency plans. And when these work—which they often do in stable environments—we mistake risk management for uncertainty navigation.
But here’s the critical distinction that most leaders miss: risk is calculable; uncertainty is not.
When you buy a lottery ticket, you face risk. The odds are quantifiable, e.g. 1 in 292 million for Powerball. You can calculate expected value, model outcomes, and make informed decisions based on probability. When you invest in a diversified portfolio, you face measured risk with historical data to guide decisions.
Uncertainty is fundamentally different. It’s what happens when you don’t know the possible outcomes, let alone their probabilities. It’s the pandemic that arrives without warning. It’s the technology that makes your business model obsolete overnight. It’s the regulatory change, market shift, or competitive disruption that wasn’t on anyone’s scenario planning spreadsheet.
It’s the October blizzard on Everest that experienced guides had never seen in decades of climbing.
According to research from MIT Sloan School of Management, organizations consistently underperform during periods of high uncertainty not because they lack talent or resources, but because they apply risk management frameworks to uncertainty problems. It’s like bringing a map to navigate fog; the tool itself is sophisticated, but fundamentally mismatched to the challenge.
Why This Matters for Decision Makers
The hikers trapped on Everest in October 2025 had done everything “right” according to risk management principles. They’d hired experienced guides, chosen the optimal season, followed established protocols, and prepared for known challenges. What they couldn’t prepare for was the unknowable.
Your organization faces its own Everest moments—situations where your carefully crafted strategic plans meet the reality of true uncertainty. These moments are increasing in frequency and intensity:
- Technological disruption arrives faster than strategic planning cycles can accommodate
- Market dynamics shift in ways historical data can’t predict
- Competitive threats emerge from unexpected sectors
- Regulatory environments transform with political winds
- Talent expectations evolve beyond traditional retention strategies
- Climate patterns behave in ways that contradict decades of baseline data
The leaders who thrive aren’t those with the most sophisticated risk models; they’re those who’ve developed the capacity to navigate uncertainty itself. They’ve moved from trying to predict the future to building organizations and practices that can adapt to whatever future arrives.
This requires a fundamental mindset shift. From control to adaptability, from prediction to preparation, from rigid planning to dynamic response. It means building what I call “the Uncertainty Edge“—the organizational and personal capability to adjust course when circumstances demand it, without losing sight of your core mission.
Think about financial advisory practices. The firms that thrived during the 2008 financial crisis weren’t those with the best market predictions; they were those with the strongest client relationships and the flexibility to adjust their service model. The practices that succeeded during COVID weren’t those with elaborate pandemic plans; they were those that could pivot to virtual service delivery in days rather than months.
The same pattern holds in corporate leadership. Companies that navigated supply chain disruptions weren’t those who predicted specific bottlenecks; they were those with diversified supplier networks and operational flexibility. Organizations that adapted to remote work successfully weren’t those with the most detailed contingency plans; they were those with cultures that supported experimentation and rapid adjustment.
Three Immediate Actions
1. Audit Your Planning Assumptions Review your current strategic plan or business development approach. Identify which assumptions are based on calculable risk (backed by data and probability) versus uncertainty (hoping conditions remain stable). For the uncertainty-based assumptions, ask: “What would we do if this assumption proved completely wrong tomorrow?”
The Everest hikers assumed October weather patterns would hold. Your organization might be assuming market conditions, client preferences, or competitive dynamics will remain predictable. Test those assumptions.
2. Build Scenario Flexibility Stop creating single-path strategic plans. Instead, develop decision triggers—specific conditions that would prompt a strategic pivot. The goal isn’t to predict which scenario will unfold, but to reduce decision-making friction when reality diverges from your plan.
The hikers who survived made real-time decisions about when to turn back, when to shelter, when to push forward. They had mental frameworks for adaptation, not just rigid plans for summit attempts. Your organization needs similar frameworks.
3. Cultivate Organizational Adaptability Identify one operational area where your team or organization is overly rigid. This might be client communication methods, service delivery models, or internal processes. Run a small experiment that tests a different approach; not to replace the current method, but to build adaptive capacity.
Adaptability is like a muscle; it atrophies without use. The time to build it is before the storm hits, not during.
The Path Forward
The hikers on Everest in October 2025 eventually descended safely, but not because the weather improved or their original plans worked. They survived because they adapted; adjusting routes, changing schedules, and making real-time decisions based on evolving conditions rather than predetermined plans.
One hiker told reporters: “We have to respect nature.” That respect isn’t about fear. It’s about recognizing that some forces can’t be controlled, only navigated.
Even if your organization won’t face literal life-or-death situations (though some decisions may feel that way), you will face moments when uncertainty demands adaptation over prediction, flexibility over control, and wisdom over rigid adherence to plan.
The theme of navigating uncertainty—and the practical tools and frameworks to do it successfully—is the foundation of my upcoming book, The Uncertainty E.D.G.E. Lead with Clarity, Adapt with Confidence, Win with Conviction. It’s available for pre-order now [PRE-ORDER LINK].
One reviewer said about the book: Every risk professional knows: risk and uncertainty aren’t the same thing. This book provides the tangible, actionable framework to help master that difference. Through diverse real-world examples—both successes and failures—you’ll see exactly how to navigate uncertainty. Whether you’re managing risk or dealing with uncertainty, these tools and lessons will elevate your decision-making. Mark Hughes, Former Group Chief Risk Officer, RBC; Board Director and Chair of the Risk Committee, UBS Group AG
Pre-orders are a big deal for authors. They tell bookstores and Amazon the book matters — which helps it reach more leaders who need it. Your early support genuinely makes a difference.
The question isn’t whether uncertainty will disrupt your plans. It will. The question is whether you’re building the capacity to thrive when it does.
When those 900 people were trapped on Everest, the ones who made it down safely weren’t the strongest or the most experienced. They were the ones who recognized that their plans no longer matched reality, and adjusted accordingly.
A Question for You:
Think about the last time a major plan fell apart due to something you couldn’t have predicted. How did you respond? And looking back, what would you do differently knowing what you know now? I’d genuinely value hearing your experience in the comments.
