Uncertain times as drivers of innovation

To understand why crisis drives innovation, I looked at three pivotal historical moments alongside data from my former professor of economics and innovation, Alfred Kleinknecht, who mapped patent filings from the 1750s to the 1980s. The peaks align almost precisely with periods of upheaval.

The Black Death (1348)

When the plague swept across the UK between 1348 and 1349, it killed between 40 and 60% of the population. The immediate practical consequence was a catastrophic shortage of agricultural workers. Landlords who had held absolute power over serfs — workers bound to the land, forced to pay taxes on everything they produced — suddenly found they had no one to work the fields.

The peasants, for the first time, had leverage. The Peasants' Revolt of 1389 followed. Better pay, fewer taxes, improved conditions. A centuries-old power structure began to crack — not because of ideology, but because the conditions that sustained it had been destroyed.

The Great Depression (1929)

The stock market crash of 1929 put one quarter of American workers out of employment. Yet from that collapse came a wave of invention. The tampon was patented in 1930. The electric shaver arrived the same year. The car radio followed. These were not entirely new ideas — the underlying problems had existed for years — but the conditions had shifted. Men out of work meant women entered the workforce in unprecedented numbers, a 24% increase to 13 million workers. People with time and desperation and no employer to rely on started making their own jobs, their own products, their own solutions.

World War II

The radar had been invented in 1904 by Christian Hülsmeier, who found a way to detect ships in fog. Nobody was particularly interested. In 1922, two American radio scientists rediscovered the same principle and applied for $5,000 in US Navy funding. They were turned down. In 1930, one of the researchers discovered he could point his radio signals at the sky and detect planes — but again, military planners said that without results in under two years, it wasn't worth their time.

Then on December 7th, 1941, 353 Japanese bombers attacked Pearl Harbor. The radar warning system was still being field tested. Two and a half thousand servicemen died. The technology that had been ignored for four decades became an overnight priority.

The same pattern held for code-breaking. Alan Turing's team didn't invent the Bombe decryption machine — they bought the underlying design from Poland, where it already existed. The mathematics were known. What the war provided was urgency sufficient to actually deploy it. The work done to break Enigma is widely considered a precursor to modern computing and artificial intelligence.

None of these innovations solved problems that were new. The peasants' lack of rights was not a new problem in 1348. The need for faster and more discreet menstrual products was not a new problem in 1929. The inability to detect approaching aircraft was not a new problem in 1941. What changed was the combination of three things:

• Changing conditions — fewer workers, mass unemployment, a world at war
• New possibilities — often technological, sometimes political, sometimes demographic
• Urgency — a sense that something had to change now

The Chinese word for crisis — wēijī (危機) — is often cited as meaning both "danger" and "opportunity". The etymology is debated, but the underlying observation holds: crisis forces a reckoning with conditions that previously seemed fixed.

The challenge with uncertainty is that it is not a problem to be solved — it is a permanent feature of the landscape. We are never going to know what our colleagues are studying, what disease we might develop, whether there will be an earthquake next year. Uncertainty is the baseline.

At Koa Health, one of the techniques we use in our CBT-based programmes is called Challenge Your Thoughts. It is designed precisely for this: when anxiety kicks in and your mind starts spiralling — boss looked at you strangely, so you will be fired, so you will lose your house, so you will die alone under a bridge — this exercise asks you to slow down and ask: what is the actual evidence for this outcome? What is the evidence against it? Which of these scenarios is most realistic?

The point is not to pretend there is no uncertainty. The point is to stop defaulting to the worst-case scenario as though it were the only scenario.

William Gibson's most quoted line is: "The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed." In the context of innovation, this is the key insight. For every problem we think is unsolved, someone somewhere is probably already working on a version of the answer. The car radio existed before it became mainstream. Working from home existed before COVID made it universal. The question is not whether a future scenario is possible, but which version of it is most likely to emerge.

This is where future scenario planning becomes a practical tool. At the Royal College of Art, we set up a unit called Xploratory, explicitly designed to build out "what if" scenarios: what if we can have children when we're 70? What if trust in religious institutions continues to decline — can we design the parts people still want, without the institutional overhead? What if the vaccines never come?

Charlie Brooker and Annabel Jones do the same thing with Black Mirror — sitting in a room, going back and forth, asking "what if this happens, and then what if that happens", building out scenario trees until a story crystallises. The negative version is Black Mirror. The positive version would be the same exercise run to find the optimistic route through the same conditions.

Rather than framing our work as managing uncertainty, I'd suggest we reframe it as designing for some certainty. Because there is always some certainty. There is always a distribution of futures, and some of them are more probable than others. Decision trees, future scenario mapping, and honest examination of which trends are already in motion — these are the tools that let us stop spiralling and start building.

The crises are coming. They always have been. The pattern from 1348 to 2020 is consistent: the teams and organisations that treat uncertain conditions not as a threat to survive, but as a signal that something previously fixed has come unstuck, are the ones that build the next wave of genuinely useful things.

Design for changing realities. Innovate on top of that. Keep your mental health intact while you do it.