We are really bad at predicting the future. But there is a way
It is that time of year when supposed future-gazers impose sweeping changes in business. Darren Savage, head of strategy at You’re the Goods, explains just how bad we are at looking ahead and urges caution.
In 1943, Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM claimed: “I think there is a world market for maybe five computers”.
Ha, what a mad fool… this example is probably completely apocryphal; but it does serve to highlight a problem that humans have with thinking about the future, which is the tendency to think that what happens in the future will mainly be like it is today, but there will be a bit more of it.
Future gazing is hard for humans because of our evolutionary limitations; we evolved to survive, not to get a clear view of the universe; as such, humans tend to see a part but think they are seeing the whole.
A big problem with prediction is laid bare – humans don’t have the necessary neurology to perceive, comprehend and manipulate a massively complex, constantly shifting and increasingly weird concept as the future.
Humans also have tremendously complex psychologies, awash with anxieties, prejudice and emotions that combine to create a letter-box view of the future that largely contains the viewer.
Having an accurate view of the future is critical to many business decisions such as what to invest in, how much budget should be allocated, what to prioritize, what structural changes need to be made, are new partnerships required etc?
One of the best-known studies on experts and prediction was conducted between 1984 and 2005 by Philip Tetlock, a psychology professor at Wharton University.
Tetlock’s research examined why experts’ predictive skills were very often no better than chance. It was summed up as ‘the average expert is as accurate at predicting the future as a dart-throwing chimpanzee’.
Tetlock found that experts, the sort of people companies rely on to help make big decisions tend to be idealistic in their overall approach, their thinking was based on one big theory or idea, and they sought out and gave weight to evidence that validated their existing view, and were often reluctant to change their minds, even when proven to be wrong.
If humans, especially experts, are utterly terrible at predicting the future, and if the future is important to predict, then how can the businesses peer ahead in a more accurate manner.
The answer is to create an unholy alliance of thinkers, an alternative to the fantasy dinner party game, a gathering of strange bedfellows who represent radically diverse types of brains that would conspire to cancel out biases, think broadly, and narrowly, logically and inventively, and without sacrificing a goat, provide a more probably view of the shape of things to come.
Take one logical thinker, someone who can scrutinize, impose order, and strip ideas of emotional waywardness. Sit them next to a weird thinker who can imagine mad things and strange possibilities and push people outside of their conventional thoughts. Place a historian opposite them who can provide a perspective on why things are the way they are and where they may end up next through the lens of the past. Throw in a science fiction author, who can talk about how current technologies, ideas and trends, could pan out over time to influencer the course of the future. And make the host a behavioral psychologist who understands human decision-making and will be able to spot and work around natural biases and emotional attachments to ideas.
If the future is not only going to be weirder than we suppose but weirder than we can suppose, then this group of minds would, if nothing else, come up with some interesting ideas about the shape of things to come and would be likely far more accurate than chimps throwing darts.