(MM) – Beyond the Cult of Prediction (Patrick Marren, Principal, Futures Strategy Group)

The essence of leadership and strategy is decision-making under conditions of fundamental uncertainty. Yet far too often, especially since the turn of the millennium, we have pretended that perfect (or at least adequate) certainty can be achieved prior to making strategic decisions. The result, at both organizational and societal levels, has been a series of strategic shocks. 9/11, the Iraq War, the Global Financial Crisis, COVID-19: each of these jolts was in large part the result of a pretense that the future could be predicted with certainty, even with scientific precision. Unfortunately, experts’ response to repeated predictive failure has been to double down on this “cult of prediction,” particularly via numerical forecasting approaches – even in areas in which prediction is either impossible or useless for planning. Fortunately, there is another approach to dealing with fundamental uncertainty: rigorous imagination. But it’s something we are not that good at, as a species, and we all need to get much better at it. This presentation will lay out the principles of rigorous imagination as an antidote to the cult of prediction.