What is the likelihood that I will still have a job by the end of 2021?
Will housing interest rates remain at the same low levels?
After one of the most disruptive years in living memory, these are the questions on all our lips. But as 2020 draws to a close, who can we turn to for accurate predictions as to what we can expect in 2021?
Every year, we turn to economists, scientists, industry consultants and even bookies.
But the accuracy of these ‘expert’ opinions turns out to be “roughly as accurate as a dart-throwing chimpanzee”, according to Roy Steiner, who has a resume which includes the Rockefeller Foundation, Omidyar Network, Gates Foundation, MIT, Cornell and McKinsey.*
History is full of experts whose predictions totally missed the mark. Albert Einstein once said that nuclear energy would never be a thing. The president of Western Union told Alexander Graham Bell that the telephone would never catch on and turned down Bell's offer of the patent for $100,000. And who could forget the record executive who said the Beatles had no future in the music business? I wonder how long his future in the business was after that?
It turns out that there is a group of people who have a record of predicting the future that has consistently surpassed everyone from financial experts to trained intelligence analysts. This group accurately predicted the outcome of the United Kingdom’s Brexit vote in 2020, Saudi Arabia’s decision to partially take its national gas company public in 2019, and that there would be 200,000 COVID-19 cases reported by 20 March 2020. (The 200,000 mark was actually hit one day earlier.)
Astonishingly, this group doesn’t have any special training and comes from a range of backgrounds you wouldn’t normally associate with being forecasters – housewives, unemployed factory workers, lawyers, and math professors.
But the group – dubbed the The Good Judgment Project by founder Professor Philip Tetlock – was able to prove its chops by doing 30% better than the other four teams in a forecasting tournament sponsored by American intelligence agencies in an effort to learn how to make better predictions. Since then, members of TGJP have been known as superforecasters.
The difference can be summed up by the analogy of the Hedgehog and the Fox. The Ancient Greek poet Archilochus wrote, “A fox knows many things, but a hedgehog knows one important thing.” When a fox is hunted, it finds many clever ways to escape its hunters. When a hedgehog is hunted, it curls up into a spiky ball and lies still.
The terms have come to describe the two different styles of leaders and thinkers. And it turns out that foxes are better at predicting the future than hedgehogs.
Philip Tetlock believes that almost anyone can learn to be a superforecaster — if they’re willing to put in the work. What separates them from everyone else, he has found, are certain ways of thinking and reasoning. One of the key ways is the ability to follow the evidence even when your gut feeling tells you otherwise, an ability which Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman calls having an outside (fox-like) versus an inside (hedgehog-like) view.
I don’t claim to be a superforecaster but I wonder whether a consultant brought in to look at a business with fresh eyes doesn’t share the same outsider-looking-in ability to a degree?**
Another key to TGJP’s success is that they work on probabilities which can change over time based on events and new information, in much the same way as bettors work the odds. For example, the probability that the world GDP will fall slightly next year from 2019 levels has increased slightly over the past few days but, reassuringly, the probability of an increase still outweighs the probability of a decrease by more than two to one according to the graph below.
The next prediction is pretty clear — it looks like it could be another six months before a vaccine or vaccines become available to around half the US population.
* Don't worry, the irony that the accuracy of Steiner's own expert opinion may be called into question on the basis of the opinion itself has not escaped me, but I'm going to go with it because I have already got this far into this article and I'm not turning back now.
** Apologies for the shameless plug for my consulting services, which include business model generation and development, strategic and business planning, change management and business scaling.
I’m Robin La Pere, no ordinary business consultant. I've been a corporate leader and owned my own businesses, so I understand the impact that so-called 'Black Swan’ events such as pandemics and recessions can have on businesses and franchises, no matter what size.
That's why I have decided to do something about it. In addition to my business consulting services and resources such as ebooks and guides, I have developed several programmes designed to help business owners and managers to navigate the current crisis more confidently.
If you're a New Zealand business, the good news is that all this may not end up costing you as much as you think – if you qualify for a grant under the Regional Business Partner Network scheme, which you almost certainly will with my help.
For our first conversation, however, I will not charge you a cent, even it takes an hour or more. I see it as our opportunity, mine and yours, to get to know each other and to share and explore. And rest assured that anything we talk about will be treated in strictest confidence by me and not shared with anyone else.
To arrange a mutually suitable time for our conversation, click on the button below and complete the Contact Form, telling me a little about yourself and letting me know whether you prefer to communicate by phone, Skype, Whatsapp, Messenger or Zoom.
I look forward to talking with you.
My 10-Step Business Sur-thrive-al Programme has been developed from lessons I learned from successfully navigating three previous recessions.
I urge you to read this article, download my free ebook The Ultimate Guide to Business Sur-thrival-al, and contact us for a free Initial Business Sur-thrive-al Consultation.
The benefit of working with a consultant like me to prepare and plan for a better year ahead is that, as an outsider looking in, I can often spot opportunities that you may miss because you're so close to the day-to-day of your business.
Another benefit is that as well as hands-on experience in improving and growing businesses, I am an ideas person and innovator and will never simply regurgitate what may have worked for other clients in the past (unless I genuinely believe they will work for you now).
Take the first step now by taking advantage of my free Initial Consultation so we can begin to explore the possibilities.
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WHO AM I?
My name is Robin La Pere. I’m a franchise and licensing consultant with 30+ years' experience and a proven track record in growing businesses.
WHY 'NO ORDINARY'?
Because 'ordinary' businesses just can't cut it in today's fast-paced hyper-competitive world. Let me help you be extraordinary!
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