Predictions:
“No airship will ever fly from New York to Paris. That seems to me to be impossible,” wrote Wilbur Wright, the co-inventor of the airplane, in 1909. Just 10 years later, in 1919, a British airship crossed the Atlantic.
“The growth of the Internet will slow drastically,” wrote Paul Krugman in 1998. “Most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s.” Krugman went on to win the Nobel Prize in Economics.
Predictions are popular because they appeal to human nature.
Every now and then so called ‘expert’ may get a prediction right, but not because he’s got divine levels of foresight. It’s because he got lucky.
Planning:
Done with the Compass! Done with the Chart! — EMILY DICKINSON
There’s a famous story about how to catch a monkey. You put nuts in a jar. The monkey reaches into the jar to grab the nuts and finds that he can’t get his fist full of food out of the narrow opening. If he lets go of the nuts, he can escape and be free. But he refuses. Instead of detachment, he chooses attachment—to what he can’t have.
The firmer our plans, the more we attach to them, even when things don’t go as planned. We close our eyes when we need to look. We remain seated when we need to move. We see what we expect to see instead of what’s actually there.
The world is evolving at dizzying speed. Tomorrow refuses to cooperate with our best-laid plans.
Uncertainty is a feature, not a bug. It’s something to be embraced.
Our strategy needs to act as compass to provide us a general sense of direction.
Thinking Space 