Uncharted Territory
Four years ago, I started writing a book about unpredictability. One nerdy detail kicked it off: the very best forecasters did not believe they could predict accurately beyond 400 days. That was the best there was. The rest of us? Maybe 150 days. This, I thought, changes everything. All management (of life and work) sits on the three-legged stool: forecast — plan — execute. But the first leg was broken, the chair now useless. How, I wondered, were we to live and work in a complex environment where so much is ineradicably uncertain?
It’s fair to say that, at the time, just about nobody understood what I was on about, and many thought I was wrong. AI. Big data. Algorithms. They were the answer! They knew everything about us because we are data. The speed with which that foolish faith has dissolved was unpredictable too: dismaying to Sili Valley execs, but heartening to me. AI got much wrong. So did algorithms, making terrible decisions about education, social welfare and hiring. When pressed, economists acknowledged that models would always fail. Historians agreed that history doesn’t repeat itself; some of the best examples were epidemics. Psychological profiles — of individuals or superstars or terrorists — didn’t predict anything either. Even DNA, the so-called “blueprint” of our lives can’t predict which blond children will turn blond. If one identical twin gets MS, so should the other, but in fact the chance is only 30% and no one quite knows why. Every model for predictability fell down.
There was a lot in my book about epidemics — not because I predicted one but because they’re a great illustration of uncertainty in life. They are generally certain (they are always with us) but specifically ambiguous: we don’t know where or when the next will break out, nor can we predict the disease. What epidemics can teach us is what to do, knowing that they will happen. So we can’t plan for them. What we can do is prepare.
Obsessed with planning, we forgot about preparation. Since the banking crisis, we’ve doubled down on efficiency, cutting margins and staff down to the bone. This is what you should do when you know exactly what’s going to happen (it’s great for assembly lines) but it is exactly what you should not do when you’re uncertain. Why? Because you lose all your margin to respond. Example: in the British National Health Service, beds in intensive care are now 100 percent occupied. This is efficient. But it isn’t robust; it means that the service doesn’t have the people or beds with which to respond to a new, unpredicted and unpredictable, virus.
Once you accept that much in life and business is unpredictable, it does change everything. But that doesn’t mean we’re helpless. They are many, many ways to prepare. But none of that can happen until we finally accept that the future is uncharted and planning our way to it won’t work.
UNCHARTED is published in the UK and in the US by Simon & Schuster.
