Aggregation of uncertainties, or iteration beats planning
Feb 7, 2026
There are two kinds of systems.
The first kind tries to predict, plan and control everything. Gosplan. Five-year strategies. Detailed business plans.
The second kind does not pretend to know the future. Markets. Evolution. Startups. The immune system.
The first kind looks smarter. The second kind wins.
Why?
Every link in a chain of decisions carries uncertainty. Uncertainties do not add up, they multiply. 10 steps at 90% confidence each = 35% at the end. The longer the plan, the more useless it is.
The economist Hayek wrote back in his day: knowledge is distributed. It cannot be gathered in one place without losses. Every time information is passed up the hierarchy, it gets distorted. That is why Gosplan lost to the market: not because the market is smarter, but because it does not lie to itself about what it knows.
Startups beat corporations for the same reason. Not because founders are more brilliant than managers. But because a startup says “we don’t know, let’s test it”, while a corporation says “we did the research and we know”.
Evolution works without any single plan. Just variation + selection. The immune system does not know which virus is coming, so it prepares for everything at once.
The practical conclusion: iteration > planning. Not because planning is bad, but because reality is more complex than any model. Systems that embrace uncertainty beat systems that deny it.
And one more corollary: the higher the uncertainty of the outcome, the less sense there is in long planning. When you don’t know what you will get, it is better to build it and see.
Originally posted in Russian on my telegram. This is a translation.