“Predictions are difficult, especially about the future,” quipped Yogi Berra (and, before him, physicist Niels Bohr). This rings especially true for those trying to run a strategy process. Uncertainty is not only everywhere in and around strategy—it is the very reason we need strategy. Without uncertainty, we would just need a plan to go from A to B.

In running a business, there are many elements that you just can’t control—the fate of the economy, political events, your competitors’ actions. Yet uncertainty is rarely accounted for in a clear and robust way in the strategy room. Even proper planning for different eventualities is often missing from the discussion. Instead, we typically prepare for one version of the future, often without understanding how likely that version is to become reality.

Strategy requires confronting uncertainty head-on by embracing the notion of probability. In our new book, Strategy Beyond the Hockey Stick: People, Probabilities, and Big Moves to Beat the Odds (John Wiley & Sons, February 2018), we focus on the importance of calibrating the odds of a strategy succeeding, by building in explicit trigger points to reexamine decisions as we learn more and by applying the probabilistic approach to how we evaluate performance afterward. By understanding the chances your strategy has of succeeding before you start to execute it, and knowing how those odds change based on specific actions you take, you can tackle uncertainty with hard empirics, not guesswork or wishful thinking.

Why do we shy away from dealing with uncertainty? The root of the problem is our tendency to view strategy as a purely intellectual exercise—a sort of corporate game of chess, perhaps even played in three dimensions by its best practitioners. However, strategy poses the kind of low-frequency, high-uncertainty problems for which the human brain is least adapted. People are prone to many well-documented unconscious cognitive biases—overconfidence, anchoring, loss aversion, confirmation bias, and attribution errors, among others. These unintentional mental shortcuts exist to help us filter information for day-to-day decisions, but they can distort the outcomes when we are forced to make big, consequential choices, infrequently, and under high uncertainty—exactly what we confront in the strategy room.

Even the most seasoned executives have only limited experience and pattern recognition in these situations. They must make decisions based on limited information, and results may not show up for years. In the meantime, any number of factors—human, market, lag, and “noise”—can intrude and overwhelm any strategist’s ability to predict an outcome. Trying to improve your strategic decision making is like trying to improve your golf game by practicing blindfolded, and not finding out if your ball went into the hole for three years.