Business prophets tend to remember their prophecies that came true, but they don’t advertise what they didn’t prophecise, and they (conveniently) tend to overlook their failures to predict correctly and or accurately.
Not only is selective memory a challenge to business prophecising integrity, but there are also a couple of other challenges to consider.
One is that the future has already happened, but you weren’t paying attention to the innovations, trends, and needs. As they say, opportunities are not missed, someone else catches them.
The second is planning your future. To paraphrase Dee Hock from his 2005 book One From Many, there are four temporal states – “What was, what is, what will be, what ought to be.” What was is our past, and maybe we can learn its lessons. What is is our present, our current state, which is likely to be a direct extension of what was. What will be refers to our most likely future following the trajectory from our past and through our present. Hock’s point is to question whether our trajectory to our most likely future through the data points of our past and present is optimal. Hock’s interesting question is, what would your future be if you were not constrained by your past or your present? With reference to your goals, what ought you do to attain them? What needs to happen, what needs to be true, for the optimal attainment of your goals?
What are you going to do to make what ought to be happen?
Adapted from Peter Drucker, The Age of Discontinuity and Dee Hock, One From Many.
