🎧🎬The Idiocy of Future Predictions (Code Red Podcast Ep15)

“Predictions are extremely difficult, especially when they concern the future”, Winston Churchill once said.

And yet, every year, as December rolls around, we’re buried under a flood of predictions from experts and self-proclaimed gurus. It’s that season again. But how do we make sense of it all—and what should we do instead to kick off the new year with real success?

"But aren’t you a futurist?" some of you asked me in the past when I criticised future predictions.

No I am not, and I’ll tell you why.

Trying to predict the future with data, AI, the intestines of sacrificed animals or the weird spells of drugged-up alleged virgin priestesses implies a belief in a deterministic future.

I don’t buy that.

Because I don’t think the future is set yet.

We can shape it together with our fellow humans.

The Good News

The future is, and remains, volatile and uncertain; otherwise, it would not be called the future but the past.

But that is also the good news about it.

It means that the future has not yet been decided. It means we can still shape it. Anything else would be incredibly boring and would also contradict our free will.

It’s neither possible nor desirable to eliminate the uncertainty of the future. We simply have to learn to deal with it in a different way:

Let’s spend less time on forecasts of a deterministic future and devote more time to shaping a desirable one.

Because “the best way to predict the future is to create it.”

As Abraham Lincoln (or whoever, it’s attributed to several leaders) put it so beautifully.

And that’s what I am all about:

Creating the future, not predicting it.

👉🎧🎬Learn more about it in this month’s Code Red episode, where the great Chris Kalaboukis and I discuss The Idiocy of Future Predictions.

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👇And let us know in the comments: What do you think about future predictions?

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🎬Video concept & editing by the fabulous Red Swan Chief Creative Officer Xaver Kettele.

♬Music: Audiojungle

If you liked this, you might also like the written column on which this discussion is based, read it here ♥️👇:

Or our episode on the Illusion of Innovation: Hackathons as Corporate Theater ♥️👇