Events

Uncertainty pervades the big decisions we all make in our lives. How much should we pay into our pensions each month? Should we take regular exercise? Expand the business? Change our strategy? Enter a trade agreement? Take an expensive holiday?

Humans are successful because we have adapted to an environment that we understand only imperfectly. We do not know what the future will hold, but we must make decisions anyway. So, we crave certainties which cannot exist and invent knowledge we cannot have.

In their new book, John Kay and Mervyn King draw on biography, history, mathematics, economics and philosophy to highlight the most successful – and most short-sighted – methods of dealing with an unknowable future. Ultimately, the authors argue, the prevalent method of our age falls short, giving us a false understanding of our power to make predictions, leading to many of the problems we experience today.

We think about the future all the time, every day, believing that knowing what lies ahead will somehow allow us to make better decisions and choices. But our appetite for certainty is doomed and our addiction to prediction perverse.

Waiting for full knowledge wastes time and opportunity, while using imagination and collective intelligence could make us more effective and organisations more legitimate. In her new book, Margaret Heffernan explores the many ways in which forecasting fails us — and examines alternative ways of thinking and working that give us both freedom and agency.