Predicting the future: a fool’s game?

I have a confession to make. I have no idea how the future will look – and neither does anyone else. Such resignation might seem out of place at the World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting, the aim of which is to assess recent global developments to find out where they’re heading. But think about it: if we did find out what the future held, we’d change our behaviour accordingly – and change the shape of the future. There’s no winning.

An honest look back at looking forward shows that predictions have always been a fool’s game. Remember Nostradamus warning the end of the world was nigh? History offers infinite testimony that tomorrow is unknowable. The Ukraine crisis or the terror of ISIS – disruptive events that strain our powers of imagination even as they unfold. We’re driven by the recurring and vain hope: no surprises, no disruption.

The act of forecasting is an expression of human frailty, a ritual, in which even I find myself taking comfort. We map the vectors from past into present and extend these lines into the future. We extrapolate as if we’re writing a classic TV drama, in which stock characters react in stock ways to stock situations. But events don’t obey such linear logic. Often the future is formed by radical breaks with the past, by coincidences and paradoxes.

But acknowledging our inability to foresee the unforeseeable should not discourage us from thinking about what lies ahead. I think – and here’s my first prediction – the ritual of forecasting has a future if it can change. We should stop trying to extrapolate the scenario for the future. We should reject this false comfort and adopt a more demanding ritual that embraces contingency. Instead of one, we need many scenarios for the future, including those based on radical breaks. We need to identify a scenario’s milestones, its crossroads at which one line of thought splits into two.

What will Germany look like in 70 years?

I tested this approach by asking 70 executives, researchers and leading politicians how Germany might look in 50 years. Such a long time frame freed them from the day-to-day constraints of their constituencies, allowing an honest look. We saw a country in good shape. But we also saw political and economic risks in various parts of the world. German society is ageing and income inequality is rising. Manufacturing jobs might decline, the many global champions in the German Mittelstand wane, prized public infrastructure crumble. We saw looming problems with education and training, funding pensions and healthcare, the integration of immigrants.

At one extreme, we sketched a Germany that would be in decline in 2064 – a poorer country, with only 65 million inhabitants and a high proportion of pensioners. Why? Because the vaunted German Mittelstand could fail to push into the new high-tech sectors of tomorrow, manufacturing could move overseas, investments could be made abroad rather than at home and Germany might keep a tight rein on immigration. At the other extreme, we saw a country that was still as wealthy as it is today – and as big, with a population of 80 million replenished by a stream of welcome foreigners. In this scenario, the Mittelstand would have pushed into new fields and manufacturing would have stayed in Germany. The country’s companies would steer the entire value chain in an economy, regardless of whether it was globalized or atomized by protectionism into trading blocs.

This did not tell us exactly how the future would look. But it gave us a perspective on cause and effect that we hadn’t had before – if that happens, then this… It offered glimpses of the political, economic and social policy options available in different situations. To catalogue them all would have been impossible. But we categorized those we came across between the extremes of “more of the same” and “new departures” to gauge how readily Germans might choose one option over another at any given time.

In the course of this, I started thinking about Herman Melville’s story Bartleby the Scrivener, whose office-clerk hero refuses to engage with anything unto his death. I was struck how Bartleby’s “I prefer not to” stands in contrast to Jonathan Swift’s Lemuel Gulliver, the archetypal adventurer yearning to strike out for new shores. Are the Germans Bartlebys or Gullivers? How they decide will shape their futures time and again.

How we decide that question for ourselves will shape our futures, too.  Are we Bartlebys or Gullivers? Will we dare to take a look at our many possible futures? Or will we prefer not to and chase that one sure forecast that keeps eluding us? I don’t have one answer for that – but I do have a number of scenarios…

Author: Martin Sonnenschein is Partner and managing Director for Central Europe at A.T. Kearney.

Image: A woman takes a picture outside the Bolshoy Ice Dome as the sun sets on the Black Sea at the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics, February 13, 2014. REUTERS/Gary Hershorn