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Fallacy: You Can Know What’s Ahead

The three cornerstones of planning—predicting the future, seeing what you want
your future to look like, and devising ways to make sure your future comes out
that way—are shaky from the start.

Start with predicting the future. Don’t. People can’t. For example: Every
significant business commentator in the 1950s insisted that the baby boom
would create enormous unemployment when the boomers started entering the
workforce in the 1960s. These experts goofed not once, but twice.

These experts failed to predict that women would flood the labor force. By
the experts’ reckoning, this flood should have created even more massive
unemployment. Yet from 1965 to 1985, the labor force grew 40 percent, while
the number of jobs grew 50 percent. That’s more jobs, in both percentage and
absolute numbers, than at any other time in America’s peacetime history.

To see another bad prediction, look around your office. Dozens of experts
predicted that huge numbers of your employees would be working from home.
Surprise: Everyone’s at work. The number of working-from-home employees is
less than 30 percent of what most people predicted. (These experts failed to
recognize that work performs a social function; most people want to be at an
office.)

Weren’t VCRs going to kill the movies? Movie attendance has surged since
VCRs were introduced. It seems that only bad movies will kill the movies, and
they’re trying.

Wasn’t television supposed to kill books? Well, books and mega-bookstores
are proliferating. The reading group has become a social phenomenon. In fact,
television probably has helped increase book sales. Would Norman
Schwarzkopf’s book have sold as many copies if the Gulf War had been covered
only on radio? And does any technique sell more books than having the author
appear on TV talk shows?

Speaking of bookstores: To appreciate why the future can’t be predicted, go
to your local bookstore. Go to the math section. Look at the top two rows.
Chances are that those books discuss today’s hot topic in mathematics: fractals.
Fractals spring from chaos theory, which suggests the unpredictability and
randomness of everything—even relationships among numbers.

If even numbers are unpredictable, and if you cannot predict something as