Name: Uncharted
Rating: 4 (42 reviews)
Author: Margaret Heffernan

What’s in it for me? Discover how much we don’t know about the future.

What’s going to happen tomorrow? You don’t know. Nobody does.

You can make predictions, sure, but they’re never much more than educated guesses. The truth is, the future is unknowable.

And yet we’re constantly thinking about and preparing for what’s around the corner – we have to. It’s a part of what makes us human.

So how do we do it? How do we plan for the future, while acknowledging that we can never know what’s actually going to happen?

Here’s one prediction for you: you’re about to find out.

In these blinks, you’ll learn

why it’s wrong to say that history repeats itself;
how to build a hospital with no waiting rooms; and
why taking more than a century to build a cathedral is a good thing.

Predictions are always uncertain, and history doesn’t repeat itself.

Predictions are always uncertain, and history doesn’t repeat itself.

What have you been thinking about today?

Whether you’ve been planning your route to work, making a schedule, or imagining dinner, one thing’s certain: you’ve been thinking about the future.

Planning ahead is part of human nature, and has an evolutionary advantage: it helps us avoid future problems. So it’s unsurprising that entire industries are built on it: insurance, pensions, tech, real estate. Predicting the future is seriously big business.

But there are problems with that. First, the world is so complex that predictions aren’t reliable. And second, despite the unreliability of predictions, people put too much faith in them. This means that when something unexpected happens, we get caught off guard.

Just ask the finance industry, which has been struggling to get predictions right for more than a hundred years.

Three men pioneered financial forecasting in the early twentieth century. Irving Fisher analyzed data to create market performance indicators. Roger Babson applied Newton’s laws of physics to economics, devising ornate graphs. And Warren Persons analyzed past performance: he believed that history would repeat itself, and the future would look like the past.

But all three men had another thing in common: tuberculosis. Which meant they knew all about uncertainty. TB could strike quickly and kill you in weeks, or lie dormant for a lifetime. The uncertainty of the diagnosis was, in some ways, as bad as the disease.

So, unable to predict their own futures, all three threw their energy into predicting the future of the markets – in very different ways.

Despite their scientific methods, both Fisher and Persons failed to predict the Wall Street Crash of 1929. Babson did predict it – but then again, he’d been predicting a crash every year since 1927.

None of them figured out how to forecast accurately, but they did leave a legacy. They showed that there was money to be made in making predictions – even if they were wrong. And today, the financial forecasting industry is huge.

Persons’s mistake is especially worth noting: it’s wrong to assume that history repeats itself. For example, politicians in the later half of the twentieth century were haunted by the memory of the 1938 Munich Agreement, which failed to prevent World War II. But their desire to avoid “another Munich” had disastrous consequences of its own, including the Suez Crisis and the Vietnam War.

The truth is, it’s safer to acknowledge that we don’t truly know what’s going to happen next. The world is just too broad, too complex to predict with accuracy or certainty.

And – as we’ll hear in the next blink – the same applies to people, too.

Scenario planning is a method for looking ahead while acknowledging uncertainty.

Scenario planning is a method for looking ahead while acknowledging uncertainty.

We’ve established that predicting the future with certainty is impossible. But that doesn’t mean we should give up on forecasting altogether. Looking ahead can alert us to dangers we do have to deal with, whether that’s the threat of war or the looming catastrophe of global warming.

Uncertainty is hard-wired into us – but we can still take action and plan for a better future.

Uncertainty is hard-wired into us – but we can still take action and plan for a better future.

People don’t always act in the most logical way, or with the appropriate degree of urgency. That’s one reason why predictions are so hard to get right, but it’s also a part of what makes us human.

Kernaussagen in Uncharted

Über den Autor

Margaret Heffernan is an author as well as an entrepreneur and chief executive. Born in the US, raised in Holland, and educated in the UK, she has worked for companies including the BBC, Standard & Poors, and InfoMation Corporation. Her books include Beyond Measure, Willful Blindness, and A Bigger Prize.