Page 20 - Harvard Business Review, November-December 2018
P. 20
Predicting the Future
by Ania G. Wieckowski
FROM THE NOVEMBER–DECEMBER 2018 ISSUE
ANTONIO IACOBELLI/GETTY IMAGES
eaders have always been eager to see into the future. What will delight customers in six
months, a year, two decades? What external factors will influence their industries? What
Ltechnologies will upset them? Uncertainty, complexity, and volatility—not to mention
our own cognitive biases—often foil these attempts to take the long view.
That’s why we need to remain vigilant in rationally calculating the future effects of big choices,
says science writer Steven Johnson. In Farsighted: How We Make the Decisions That Matter the
Most, Johnson reminds us that “the ability to make deliberative, long-term decisions is one of the
few truly unique characteristics of Homo sapiens”—and we’re actually getting better at it.
Take scenario planning. The power of this common tool lies in the discipline with which it forces
us to explore uncharted territory. For example, we can counteract the “fallacy of extrapolation”—
a bias that causes us to assume that a current trend will continue into the future—by imagining in
