We live in an unpredictable world. A world where few predicted the Ukraine invasion, where almost no one predicted the teal wave, and where no one seemingly knew from one moment to the next whether or where the Queen would appear next during her Platinum Jubilee.
I have lost count of the number of times I have ignored local weather forecasts and set out on my 15-kilometre walk in the face of predictions of heavy rain, to arrive hot bothered and sun-burnt in the 4 Pines at the end of a trek in glorious sunshine.
How come some get COVID (repeatedly), and others seem immune? Why is one house burnt to the ground and the one next door is untouched in a bushfire? Why did people ever buy the records of Cilla Black?
In most things in life, we can no more control them than a princess trying to control her little prince brother at a jubilee.Credit:Getty
Despite the overwhelming evidence that we have far less of a clue about what is around the corner than we feel comfortable admitting, we devote enormous amounts of time and resources to behaving as though the world is predictable. As long as we screw our eyes into a determined squint and try really hard, it is all fathomable.
We all play the game that Winston Churchill observed of politicians: “Politics is the ability to foretell what is going to happen tomorrow, next week, next month and next year. And to have the ability afterwards to explain why it didn’t happen.”
It is a mystery to me why we are so adverse to experimentation. Aside from the mad minority of anti-science nut-jobs, sane people benefit daily from curiosity-driven experimentation that is the foundation of proper science. If perhaps the single greatest achievement of humankind, science, doesn’t give us a bit of clue as to how to conduct ourselves in the matter of the future, then we are doomed.
‘Politics is the ability to foretell what is going to happen tomorrow, next week, next month and next year. And to have the ability afterwards to explain why it didn’t happen.’
Winston Churchill
Instead, in careers, education and in organisations, we remain in the grip of the fantasy of strategic plans, management by objectives, key performance indicators, goal-setting and all the other static oversimplifications of a complex, non-linear, dynamical world.
Instead of pretending we can predict and control, we need to take a more humble perspective that acknowledges the limits of our ability to control. We need to think in terms of trying to influence the outcomes instead of over-claiming that we can determine them. We need to train people to try things to see if we can shape the outcome in a desirable direction, and if it works, to try to reinforce and sustain that outcome. And if that turns to custard, to try and shut down the outcome, or retrieve the situation. We should expect plenty of custard while striving for the magic pudding.
