Do you ever try to predict the future? Are you usually right, or wrong? If so, then read on.
Can you predict the future of your industry? Can you predict the future of your business? No one can say with certainty what will happen next week much less one year from now. And five years? Not a chance.
Yogi Berra reportedly said, ?It?s hard to make predictions, especially about the future.?
Everyone agrees. Predicting the future is hard. It is so hard that a fifty percent success rate is considered extraordinary for a professional futurist. In other words, the professionals are wrong at least half of the time.
And yet businesses try to predict the future all of the time. In fact, there are three basic business tools which require future predictions:
Future Revenues: At the most primitive level businesses predict future revenues. For better or worse ?estimated future revenues? figures govern many of our proposed business decisions. These estimated figures are often wrong but we nonetheless establish spending patterns for years to come based upon this guesswork.
Industry Scenarios: One level up from revenue predictions is the prediction of industry scenarios in which we try and guess what are competitors are likely to do in the future.
Strategic Planning: The most complex level of predictions takes place in strategic planning. Most high-performing businesses set annual and long-term objectives and develop plans to meet those objectives. Resource planning, financial planning, market planning, sales planning and project planning all depend upon how well businesses predict the future in their strategic plans.
One of the problems with these business tools is that businesses end up developing ?planned reactions? to guessed-about future events instead of creating their own plans. A second problem is that businesses usually measure the success of these ?planned reactions? based upon whether or not they produce the predicted results.
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Source: http://zivili.org/2012/02/26/predicting-future/
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