Update:

A year ago (or so) I wrote this post on the perils of prediction. I looked at how really smart people can’t predict the future, even on a one-year horizon, much less on a ten-year view.

The fact is, this is really hard to do. I contend you shouldn’t try…my Resilient5 program is designed to create resilient organizations regardless of what surprises the future might hold.

Some recent research has updated this idea.

Not surprisingly, people have turned again to a technological solution to predict the future….AI. Also, not surprisingly, they have been disappointed. Recent research conducted by Wakefield Research for Pecan.ai shows:

I point you to the word “guesswork.” (I’m looking at you, personas and customer journey maps).

I quoted this last week: if you think technology will solve your problems, you don’t understand technology or your problems.

The answer is to build trust and relationships, which prepares you for whatever the future might hold…and then create an agile culture and skillset within your organization. Build your enterprise like a skyscraper that sways with an earthquake.

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In its own way, this idea has become a trope of its own. We were told by now that there were going to be flying cars. While tropes often become trivialized cliches, they almost always contain some truth to them.

In this case, the truth is this: predicting the future is really hard to do.

The Economist takes its medicine every year with an article looking back at its predictions for the current year. I recently ran across this article from Forrester, a thought-leading consultancy focused on customer engagement.

They transparently looked back at their predictions for 2021 and noted some hits and some misses. (This is a tough decision because in retrospect your hits and your misses seem obvious.) Example of a hit: hybrid events. Example of miss: 5G adoption pushing enterprises to “the edge.”

Look, all you need is a Google search to find any manner of faulty economic forecasts, business forecasts, and weather forecasts.

There’s a larger point here. Predicting the future was always hard and it's harder now. We want to be planners, but there’s so much we don’t know. To illustrate a key point, in their review of their 2020 predictions, the Economist said “Well, we didn’t see that coming.”

Of course. A pandemic and a racial reckoning. You didn’t see that coming.

All this “transparency” only covers one-year predictions. Imagine the accuracy rate looking 10 years down the road. The graveyard of dead trends is massive.

Public opinion is equally unpredictable. Seemingly entrenched positions can turn fast—here, Chartr looks at attitudes toward marijuana, but we saw similar movement in opinions toward gay marriage

What does all this mean to communicators? We want to plan for the future—we want to skate where the puck is going—but how often does that end up putting us in the wrong place, wrong arena, wrong sport.

We also know that we can’t be driven minute-by-minute without a larger direction.

There is a middle ground. Build your platform on pillars that support your ability to respond to whatever might happen—building trust, creating culture, being relevant, and promoting common understanding with your stakeholders. There are a lot of ways to do that, one of which is our Resilient5 program.

You don’t have to be a hostage to predictions.