Inc.
The future may be chaotic, but being constantly surprised is not inevitable. Stanford research suggests better predictions come from balancing big-picture trends with concrete, local signals.
5 Questions to Better Predict the Future, According to Stanford Research
Author: Jessica Stillman
If you feel like you’ve been repeatedly punched in the face by events over the past few years, you’re not alone.
“The world today is more complex than before, characterized by traits that include nonlinearity, volatility and interconnectedness,” EY recently opined.
U.N. secretary-general António Guterres was more blunt: “The context is chaos. … We are a world brimming with conflict, impunity, inequality, and unpredictability.”
The pandemic, inflation, climate change, war, AI acceleration—the surprises have come thick and fast. No wonder so many business leaders feel perpetually off balance and unable to plan for the future.
We’d all love to see a return to greater peace and predictability. But assuming things will stay wild for a while longer, is there anything you can do to get better at foreseeing what’s coming so you can better prepare for it?
Actually, yes, suggests new Stanford research on why some people are better at predicting the future while others end up dazed and bruised by events. The study suggests specific questions to ask yourself to get a little better at planning for whatever the world is going to throw at us next.
Two ways predictions go wrong
The dark art of predicting the uncertain future has generally been left to forecasters, professional strategists, and CIA analysts. But the team at Stanford wanted to bring a psychological perspective to the problem. How do people tend to think about predicting the future? What mistakes do they commonly make? And can these insights help people face fewer unpleasant surprises?
The details of many events are completely unpredictable, of course. No one can foresee which particular disease will emerge from which hotspot at which particular time and become a pandemic. But it was possible to clock rising numbers of emerging viruses and guess that one would eventually go global. (Bill Gates famously did so in a 2015 TED Talk.) And if you saw it coming, you could better prepare.
So what separates those who are relatively better at making these sorts of strategic predictions from the perpetually surprised?
The Stanford team found that people who fail to foresee and prepare for future events generally make two kinds of mistakes. They either overvalue concrete information that is personal and local to them, or they think too abstractly and consider only distant, big-picture trends.
“A CEO, for example, might focus on a handful of tweets from a rival CEO, placing too much weight on these local signals while missing or misinterpreting broader industry patterns,” researcher Serena Lee explained to Stanford News.
Or the CEO might go the other way, ignoring the local context and looking only at broad trends or high-level theorizing. Either extreme seems to produce worse predictions. If you want fewer surprises, the best bet is combining the concrete and personal with the distant and abstract, the Stanford team found.
Better questions for predicting the future
Which makes for a very interesting research paper. But, practically, how can that help everyday entrepreneurs or anyone else who keeps getting caught unprepared by events?
Nir Halevy, another of the researchers behind the study, offered Inc. a series of questions to ask yourself to help you better toggle between different perspectives and thus improve your ability to predict the future:
- Why / How / What. If you’re trying to predict how people might act, it’s useful to think about their motivations. These why questions nudge us toward abstract, big-picture thinking. On the other hand, asking what they’ll do and how they’ll do it encourages more concrete thinking. “Answering all three questions helps decision makers analyze the desirability (“why would they do this?”) and feasibility (“how might they execute this?”) of various courses of action by others,” Halevy explains.
- Near / Far. Similarly, thinking about what will happen in the more distant future fosters abstract thinking. Focusing on the near future pushes you to think more concretely. You will avoid the most surprises if you consider both. Shifting between near-term (“What will they do next quarter?”) and long-term thinking (“What will they do in the next five years?) “facilitates preparation for a wider range of threats and opportunities than considering just one of these time perspectives,” Halevy stresses.
We all need strategic thinking these days
I also asked Halevy to whom this research applies. He answered: “Balancing abstract and concrete thinking may be particularly valuable in fast-paced sectors characterized by rapid innovation and intense competition. Preparing for strategic surprises in these environments may be especially important for vulnerable parties and those engaged in high-stakes decisions about how to deploy limited resources.”
It’s a very sensible, academic-sounding reply. But as I reflected on it, I thought I could probably sum it up in simpler language: This kind of strategic thinking helps those in fast-changing industries, those facing intense competition, and those whose resources are limited.
That’s nearly all of us these days.
Chaos, unfortunately, doesn’t look like it’s going away anytime soon. Remembering to move between the abstract and the concrete, the near and far, and the tactical and strategic will hopefully help us all get a little better at guessing what’s coming so we can prepare for it.
Credits: TCA, LLC.