Why even great predictions don't create great solutions

Why even great predictions don’t create great solutions Rita McGrath | Thought Sparks

Introduction

Research on how well people can predict the future comes to a resounding conclusion: not well.

Asking “What will happen to me?” in a future situation misses the point. Instead, it’s much more fruitful to consider multiple possible future states and ask, “What would we do if this happened?”

Wisdom from Arie de Geus.

The hunger for prediction in an uncertain world To say that people don’t like uncertainty is an understatement. Journalist Maggie Jackson has written a book about it – called Uncertain: The Wisdom and Wonder of Being Unsure. As she says in a recent interview, we need “routine and familiarity. Most of life is what scientists call predictive processing. That is, we’re constantly making assumptions and predicting. You just don’t think that your driveway is going to be in a different place when you get home tonight. You can expect that you know how to tie your shoelaces when you get up in the morning.

We’re enmeshed in this incredible world of our assumptions.

The Mayor of Rotterdam’s dilemma When de Geus was at Royal Dutch Shell, he used this parable to spark conversations about the value of predictions.

“Imagine that it is 1920, and you have somehow been granted absolute power to predict the future. You happen to visit the mayor of Rotterdam, and during that time, you describe in vivid detail what is going to happen to his town during the next 25 years. Thus, during an otherwise perfectly normal working day, the mayor hears about the advent of the Weimar Republic, hyperinflation, the 1929 stock exchange crash, the Great Depression that followed, the rise of Nazism in Germany with its (for Rotterdam) damaging economic politics of autarchy, the outbreak of the Second World War, the carpet-bombing of the town’s city center, and finally, the systematic destruction of the town’s port installations during the calamitous winter of 1945.”..

What would we do if?

A much better question Why do we not prepare for even fairly reliable forecasts when we ask how a future event would affect us? It’s because we are ignoring a fundamental premise of how human cognition works. Citing the work of David Ingvar, De Geus shows that the brain is constantly attempting to make sense of the future. Ingvar calls it “creating a memory of the future.” For instance, as you are reading this newsletter, you may glance at your calendar to see whether it is yet time to get on another Zoom call. You might consider what would happen if you fail to join the Zoom.

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Why the early warnings system works

As I’ve described in Seeing Around Corners, going through what I call an early warnings exercise facilitates you and your team creating a memory of 2 It accentuates your ability to “see” and take action on early the future. warnings and weak signals. The way it works is to specify a “time zero” event which is a potential future inflection point with either good news for you and your organization or not such good news. Then, working backward, you ask yourself “What would have to be true if this were becoming more likely?” Then, you work with your team to think about what action you would take if a combination of weak signals were to begin to come together in a compelling way – we call this the process of establishing tripwires.

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