Prediction Addiction
It’s time to break free from the merchants of false certainty
FUTURE, n. That period of time in which our affairs prosper, our friends are true, and our happiness is assured. — Ambrose Bierce 1
We humans are curiously susceptible to predictions about the future.
Our desire to know what’s coming has presented opportunities for merchants of certainty throughout the ages, providing employ for palm readers, tea-leaf diviners, and rune casters.
Astrology of course remains ever-popular, even though some of us find it all a bit fishy.
But then as a Pisces, I would say that...
The ancient world
Antiquity was equipped with an eclectic array of prediction purveyors, including:
alectryomancers — divining the future from roosters pecking grain, for example by spacing grains for each letter of the alphabet around the perimeter of a circle in which the bird was tethered, the order of grain pecks spelling out a message. Further interpretation of the output from this avian equivalent of an Ouija board would presumably be required — autocorrect not having yet been invented.2
augurs — interpreting bird flight to decode supposed signals from the gods as to auspicious or inauspicious circumstances (auspices — from the Latin auspicium — “looking at birds”). Politically motivated augurs were known to spin doctor their interpretations to delay pivotal state functions such as elections. 3
geomancers — decoding marks in sand or soil; a very popular divination method throughout Africa and Europe during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. 4
hydromancers — various practices involving water, such as reading ripples, adding drops of oil and interpreting the coloured patterns, and even throwing in loaves of bread which either sank and were therefore “accepted” — meaning good fortune, or bobbed back up — meaning bad luck. 5
onomancers — the interpretation of names, such as in the Secretum Secretorum — purportedly a letter from Aristotle to Alexander the Great, advocating adding up numerical values assigned to the letters in the names of two antagonists, dividing the total by 9, and comparing the remainders to predict the winner. 6
There were some darker methods dreamed up by more macabre merchants of certainty, such as reading the entrails of sacrificed animals by extispectors. 7
More specialised still were the haruspectors who, presumably unimpressed by the insights afforded from staring at undifferentiated innards, focused specifically on livers.8
In ancient Greece this practice was known as hepatoscopy or hepatomancy, Plato noting in Phaedrus that it was held in higher regard than common or garden augury. 9
One certainty merchant stands out amongst the serried ranks above — the oracle.
Brought bang up to date by the cigarette-smoking, cookie-baking character in The Matrix movies, the most famous oracle in antiquity was high priestess Pythia who hung out at the Temple of Apollo at Delphi.10
My wife and I visited the temple at Delphi on our honeymoon in 1987. I was looking forward to consulting the oracle while I was there, but unfortunately she was absent due to unforeseen circumstances….
The modern world
In a curious twist of synchronicity, the advert above popped up while I was reading a recent article by Joe Zammit-Lucia in CEOWorld magazine.11
The advertisers have clearly divined that many CEOs would like more insight into what’s coming over the hill — but I’m not sure that many will go for the above app.
The senior executive predilection for prediction is already well served by the certainty merchants of the schizophrenic mainstream management consulting industry.
Why schizophrenic?
Well, on the one hand, all the mainstream consulting firms espouse the need for organisations to create cultures of innovation, agility, and adaptiveness if they are to thrive in an ever more uncertain and unpredictable world.
On the other hand, those same firms continue to peddle predictions about that inherently unknowable future so they can sell their one-size-fits-all, purportedly “best practice” consultancy services.
Some have even doubled down on their putative predictive powers by touting “future best practice”... 12
On the receiving end of these predictions will be many of the same clients whose strategic plans, based on previous predictions, were blown away in early 2020 by the arrival of Covid-19 pandemic lockdown restrictions on meetings and travel.
The more forward-looking senior executives recognised that as a wakeup call to move beyond the legacy focus on organisational strategy — which, in an increasingly uncertain and unpredictable world, is a catastrophically sluggish, constraining, and potentially fatal approach to organisational sense making. 13
One alluring prediction that’s surfaced from time to time, but still to happen, is the demise of the mainstream management consulting industry itself.
That day edges closer, as awareness increases of what Mariana Mazzucato and Rosie Collington point to in the title of their book “The Big Con: How the Consulting Industry Weakens our Businesses, Infantilizes our Governments and Warps our Economies”. 14
Ordinary front-line employees have long borne the brunt of the seemingly endless revolving door of outsiders relentlessly undermining their own capacity to contribute to shaping the future success of their organisations.
They often wonder — out loud to those who will listen — why their own senior executives fail to see how this reliance on outsiders undermines development of the organisational innovation, agility, and adaptiveness muscles that are crucial to its future success.
However, that reliance is due to the one form of certainty mainstream Big Con firms genuinely provide to their senior executive clients — the certainty that however bad the organisational outcome, they’ll have the excuse “Don’t blame me, blame <insert name of Big Con firm hired here>”.
That’s the ultimate payoff of the Big Con — giving senior executives confidence that even though their organisations may go down, their careers don’t have to.
Only when senior executives focus on their primary responsibility — creating a culture of innovation, agility, and adaptiveness so the organisation can thrive in an increasingly uncertain and unpredictable world — will they be able to break free from the debilitating disease of prediction addiction.
Questions for Reflection
Is your organisation locked into the legacy habit of predicting an increasingly uncertain future..?
Is it doing enough to create a culture that’s fit for an increasingly uncertain and unpredictable world..?
What do you predict will happen if not..?
Originally published in The Cynic’s Word Book (1906) - republished as The Devil’s Dictionary (1911).
Cited by Walter Burkert, the German scholar of Greek mythology in his 1992 book The Orientalizing Revolution: Near Eastern Influence on Greek Culture in the Early Archaic Age (Thames and Hudson), p. 51. (Ibid Augury).
The Oracle was played by Gloria Foster in The Matrix and The Matrix Reloaded, and by Mary Alice in The Matrix Revolutions and the Enter the Matrix video game. Alice took over when Foster died before her role in Revolutions had been shot. There’s more on Pythia here.
Joe Zammit-Lucia’s article “What Has Changed? Almost Everything” (8 February 2024) explores the challenge senior executives face in bridging politics and business. You may be served different advertisements, so if you want the palm reading app, the URL is in the image above. However, I can’t predict if it will help…
Admittedly most of the mainstream firms no longer do this, but you can still have fun by googling “future best practice”. Just remember, caveat emptor…
See the previous article From Strategy to Sense Making.
See the previous article and video How management consulting went rogue which explored The Big Con book.