Optimal Leadership  by Wayne M. Angel, Ph.D.
The Optimal Organization / Establish Foresight: Can We Predict the Future?
















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Of course, we can.  We have been doing it for thousands of years.  The astronomical observatories of the past were able to predict celestial events with a very high degree of accuracy.  It is, however, only in the last few centuries that the prediction business has really gotten underway as the scientific enterprise.  The fundamental proposition of science is to demonstrate that one's theories of the world are valid by making accurate predictions.  So what! We all know we can predict the future of physical systems.  Can we predict the future of human affairs?  Again of course we can.  We do it all the time.  Social interaction would be impossible if there were not some very predictable behavior in our complex socio-cultural-political-commercial world.  Actually the problem of forecasting in the physical world and the social world are essentially the same theoretical problem.  I will discuss this in greater detail in Section 2, where I will discuss the limitations imposed by complexity, chaos theory, contingency theory, and evolutionary dynamics.

The important question is not can we predict but rather how accurately can we predict? Many claim to predict.  But how accurate are they? Just because it must obviously be possible to predict does not mean we know how.  The prediction business about human affairs is littered with absurd soothsayer beliefs.  I wish I could ignore these, but there are still many people who believe in Tarot cards, astrology, and the “Madam Ruby's” of this world.  What are of greater concern to me are the less obviously false approaches that attempt to dress themselves with the appearance of rationality and science.  Peter Schnaars effectively demonstrates many examples in his book, Megamistakes.  Schnaars took the simple (Although no one else seems to have thought to do it as extensively.) scientific step of checking the predictions made by a large number of mainstream well respected "Think Tanks" and other groups of leading experts in their fields.  The record as Schnaars says is dismal.  I recommend his book.  It is important to realize how very easy it is to be so very wrong.

It sometimes appears that the corporate world has lost faith in strategic planning, which, at its core, assumes we can make some useful predictions about the future.  I do not know if Schnaars killed strategic planning but its demise was concurrent with his book.  Just because it was done wrong in the past is not reason to give up.  It is, however, reason to be careful.  It is possible to do it right, although it is not easy.  I will discuss how, in detail with examples, in the Section on The Theory of Society.  For the present I will simply state that my simulations demonstrate that organizational achievement is very sensitive to our ability for forecast.  The quest to forecast is well worth the effort.  This should be obvious.

It should also be obvious that sometimes we can do so accurately and other times cannot get even close.  I take a very hard line position that a forecast is of no value unless there is a substantiated estimate of the accuracy of the forecast.  For the present I will leave this subject noting that there are 4 factors that determine the accuracy.  1) How well do we understand the dynamics of the system?  2) Which outcome parameters have mathematically chaotic behavior?  3) How accurately can we measure the current state?  4) What is it that we don't know?

It is not easy to predict, especially the future.

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