Making predictions

By definition, in innovation we are dealing with the future. And we know that the future is always a foreign country – they will do things differently there.

The problem, of course is in prediction. And that problem is compounded by the degree of attention that we pay to our leaders at any given time.

Take Davos. The great and the good regularly assemble there in order to pontificate. In 1997 the world’s political and economic elect designated Southeast Asia as the most dynamic region. This was shortly ahead of meltdown, the Asian financial crisis, when Thailand, hardest hit, effectively became bankrupt.

Then in 2008 Davos totally failed to predict the forthcoming global banking crisis, initiated by Bear Stearns and Lehmann Brothers.

Almost laughable was the 1991 prediction of Lord Rees-Mogg, one of Britain’s most respected pundits, who foresaw “a decade of escalating economic and political disorder unparalleled since the 1930s.” Right outcome (broadly). Wrong decade.

Robert Millikan, awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1923, declared: “There is no likelihood that man can ever tap the power of the atom.”

The problem arises fundamentally from hubris. I get a senior governmental or academic position and start to believe that I know what the future holds.

It was George Santayana who said that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

Perhaps more useful are the words of Yogi Berra: “It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future.”

On seeing and not seeing into the future

It’s always a risky business.

In the period before the dissolution of the Soviet Empire, I made several working trips to the various capital cities of Central and Eastern Europe.

Following a trip to Prague early in 1989, I came home and said to whomever would listen, “It’s going to be all over in months. They just need to push at the door”. And the Prague Spring, the Velvet Revolution, happened just a few months later.

A few weeks after Prague, I made my first trip to East Berlin. Through Checkpoint Charlie, for a meeting of the board of directors of the International Advertising Association. After dinner, I went out walking the city with my dear friend, the late Michel Reinarz, communications boss of Nestlé.

All I could see were the telltale signs of an autocratic and repressive regime – policemen with sub-machine guns and German Shepherd dogs, barbed wire, watchtowers, floodlighting, the Wall. The whole kit. And no signs of life evident at all in this great capital city in the late evening.

So I went home and announced to colleagues that, in my opinion, it would be a decade or more before any real change would be possible there, so strong did the grip of the communists appear.

How wrong I was. Thousands started to leave East Germany and demonstrations sprung up – all without the benefit of today’s social networking – most famously in Leipzig. This was led by the chief conductor of the city’s legendary Gewandhaus Orchestra, Kurt Masur. Just like in Prague, it was all over so quickly. And by November the first sections of the wall were demolished.

We can’t always predict the future with any accuracy. But still we have to try – to do the best we can. A problem is that there’s no evidence that politicians, journalists and senior managers are any better at this than the rest of us.

I miss Michel. He was a life-enhancer.