Famous and Grandiosely False Future Predictions and How to Avoid Them

“Predictions are extremely difficult, especially when they concern the future”, Winston Churchill once said.

And indeed correct predictions are more of a fluke.

“The horse will always exist. Automobiles, on the other hand, are merely a passing fad,” predicted the president of the Michigan Savings Bank in 1903.

“The iPhone has no chance of surviving on the market,” Steve Ballmer, then president of Microsoft, is reported to have said in 2007. And the futurologist Matthias Horx explained in 2001, “the Internet will not develop into a mass medium like radio and television in the foreseeable future.”

All these respected gentlemen have been carried away by one-sided predictions about the future, and they were all wrong.

We simply don’t know in advance. The iPhone could indeed have been a terrific flop, just like Apple’s personal digital assistant Newton, Microsoft’s iPod variant Zune, or the cell phone family for young audiences and social media KIN, also from Microsoft.

Sometimes seemingly great ideas are complete pipe-drops, and things that are not so great at all are unexpected sales hits.

The future is and remains volatile and uncertain, otherwise it would not be called the future but the past.

But that is also the good thing about it.

It means that the future has not yet been decided. It means we can still shape it. Anything else would be incredibly boring and would also contradict our free will, which we as humans supposedly like to exercise. We do not have to eliminate the uncertainty of the future, but learn to deal with it differently and better.

Spend less time on forecasts of a deterministic future and devote more time to shaping a desirable one.

Because “the best way to predict the future is to create it,” as Abraham Lincoln once put it so beautifully.

Scenario Thinking is a great way to do so.

The methodology was originally applied by the US Air Force for strategic planning. Then, in the 1960/70, a team at Royal Dutch Shell adopted scenarios for business purposes.

With great success: Shell had already been prepared for an oil-shock scenario when others didn’t even dare to think about it. As a result, Shell was able to skyrocket from a rather weak market position to the top 2 of the world’s leading oil companies.

How did they do that? They didn’t try to predict the future, they created it.

If you would like to know more about scenario thinking and the scenario process, visit us on www.redswan.at or toss me an email to office ‘at’ redswan.at