The Hidden Dangers of Perfect Prediction

In Greek myth, Cassandra was given the gift of true prophecy by Apollo, but when she did not return his love he cursed her to be disbelieved by all who heard her.  As a result, she was blessed with the ability to see the future, but was powerless in her ability to alter it.  There is a deep lesson to the curse, which is that perfect prediction implies an inability to change the future.  If something is perfectly predictable, no actions by any agency can alter the forces creating the future.  In a perfectly predictable world, everyone is doomed to make the best of what is given.  Only in uncertainty can people or organizations hope to drive change in the world or in their own destinies.  Uncertainty creates the power to change. 

Scenarios offer a range of alternate futures because the future is not predetermined, and the actions of people and institutions will shift how the future will turn out.  In their plurality, scenarios offer choices to organizations.  However, it is also true that people and organizations inherit a world in which major driving forces of change have momentum.  These driving forces include global trends such as the economic and political growth of the developing world, sustainability and resource constraints, and the global calorie imbalance.  These currents of change cannot be entirely altered or stopped, however like a river they may be guided in different directions.

The Cassandra myth offers another powerful insight – that parts of the future that are most probable can be perceived as impossible and disregarded.  This is due to mental models, informal and tacit understandings of the world and the future people create based on experience.  Studies have shown that the human brain takes considerable time and energy to create a mental model of the future that dictates all decisions, even reflex actions.  All information about the environment and the future is filtered through it.  Contradictory information is either rejected or rationalized.  When the environment changes, the brain continues to make decisions based on an outdated mental model, often leading to injury or death. 

Just as people develop mental models, so do organizations.  Like individual mental models, these “official futures” that exist in organizations are often unexamined, tacit systems of thinking and behavior that have developed over a long period of time, and act as filters to interpret external events and conform organizational behavior.  Any future that differs from that mental model, however plausible, will most likely be rejected. Organizations, just like people, cannot predict the future, so the “official future” inside an organization is wrong, yet it continues to guide decisions every day. 

Therefore a basic tenet of futures studies is that images of the future affect the decisions people make and how they act. It assumes that human will can affect the course of events to create futures that are significant transformations of the present. Images of alternative futures inform action by providing an intellectual fulcrum with which we can critique the “official future” and open the organization to updating the image of the future being used to make decisions by the C-Suite or frontline employee.