It is that time of year when supposed future-gazers impose sweeping changes in business. Darren Savage, head of strategy at You’re the Goods, explains just how bad we are at looking ahead and urges caution.
In 1943, Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM claimed: “I think there is a world market for maybe five computers”.
Ha, what a mad fool… this example is probably completely apocryphal; but it does serve to highlight a problem that humans have with thinking about the future, which is the tendency to think that what happens in the future will mainly be like it is today, but there will be a bit more of it.
Future gazing is hard for humans because of our evolutionary limitations; we evolved to survive, not to get a clear view of the universe; as such, humans tend to see a part but think they are seeing the whole.
A big …