Why your brain is terrible at predicting the future
We just can't see our deep flaws and so miss by cognitive bias, randomness and false assumptions about certainty and inevitability.
5 min read
Jan 2023
It’s the time of year when blogs and other social media dare to dream what the next twelve months might bring. Despite Benjamin Franklin's accurate assertion that life’s only certainties are death and taxes, many experts will be prophesying many things across many topics and the subject matter of this column – digital design and leadership – will be no exception.
This author therefore feels emboldened to join the flock of fortune-tellers by adding a prediction to the growing pile. It is that all new year predictions will be wrong, and the ones which are right will be so because of luck, because the future has already arrived, or because there will be so many predictions (including contradictory ones) that some of them are bound to be true.
Put a fiver on it. It’s the safest money you’ll invest this year.
The elephant in the room is that predictions are worthless because we are terrible at making them. We are barely better than chance.
At the time of writing the football World Cup 2022 has just completed, with romanticists and Argentinians alike delighted to see Lionel Messi lifting the Copa Mundial on his fifth and final attempt at the age of 35. It was a fascinating tournament, with a breath-taking final and many surprise results along the way. It is worth pausing for a moment to look at the shocks; see them outlined below (pre-competition FIFA world rankings in brackets):
Saudi Arabia (51st) beat Argentina (3rd) 2 – 1
Cameroon (43rd) beat Brazil (1st) 1 – 0
Australia (38th) beat Denmark (10th) 1 – 0
Tunisia (30th) beat France (4th) 1 – 0
Morocco (22nd) beat Belgium (2nd) 2 – 0, Spain (10th) 3 – 0 (on penalties) and Portugal (8th) 1 – 0
What all of these results have in common is that no credible pundit predicted any of them. Before each match no one had identified a run of form, a unique approach to strategy or a particular playing formation which would give the underdog a chance of beating their more illustrious opponent. So, it seems that pundits can’t do surprises, they can just do obvious.
With football punditry it was ever thus.
In 1995 Alan Hansen famously said of the all-conquering Manchester United team of the 90s and 00s “you can’t win anything with kids”.
In 2016 Gary Lineker famously had to come good on his promise that he would present Match of the Day in his underpants if Leicester won the Premier League title after having previously Tweeted “Claudio Ranieri? Really?” when the Italian was appointed as manager a year previously.
The reason that pundit predictions are notoriously inaccurate is that they are based on the flawed premise that the universe is inevitable and linear which of course it isn’t. This erroneous assumption is one of several biases which make us so awful at predicting outcomes ahead of time.
In short the world is noisy and ambiguous and random and chaotic and our small brains simply haven’t evolved far enough to properly understand it.
Deliberateness avoids arbitrariness
For the reasons outlined above, we make the majority of our 35,000 daily decisions unthinkingly. This is good for decisions which are quick and easy, but less helpful for bigger or more difficult decisions. Throw into the mix the human tendency to get married to our opinions and we are reminded that we are never far away from making arbitrary decisions for reasons we don’t fully understand but can probably justify if pushed.
It's not just at a personal level that we can make unconscious decisions – when humans get together in social and professional settings, a whole new range of dynamics come in to play which can impact decision-making in invisible but substantive ways:
Group think – “Everyone else thinks this so they must be right”
Conservative bias – “We’ve always done it this way”
Professional hierarchy – “I don’t agree with my boss but am too scared to say”
Personality hierarchy – “I’m an introvert and I’m not sure but my extroverted colleagues appear very confident”
Social hierarchy – “I’m young and junior and while I don’t understand, my older more senior colleagues seem convinced”
Incorrect assumptions – “Well this works in another context so it will definitely work in this context”
Pre-programming – “This is what worked last time”
Design provides us with frameworks to make sure we avoid arbitrariness whether based on personal or social biases.
Deliberateness is predictive
Customers and users have experiences with the products and services we build, whether they are designed or not. The more time designers invest in predicting and understanding their needs, the more equipped they are to design high-quality experiences. Design therefore is committed to understanding what user needs (current and future) are and the context within which they need to work. Predictive design can be achieved through the following:
The pursuit of insight – good design has a healthy scepticism towards opinion, preferring instead evidence-led processes which explore user attitudes, needs and behaviours and uses those as the basis for decision-making. Predictive design is committed to the idea that no good ideas exist within the building, because that’s not where the customer, nor their valuable insights, lie.
Scenario planning – design needs to be effective within particular contexts, which can be geographical, environmental, technical or human. By exploring and understanding these, designers can ensure their decisions are effective in the environment within which they need to succeed, making the difference between something working, and something working well.
Process not project – design is never finished, because everything can always get better all the time. Design makes the future better by learning from the past and present.
Design therefore is about stacking the odds in the decision-maker’s favour and to mitigate against all the influences which cause people to make sub-optimal decisions. It empowers people and teams by providing the insight needed to intimately understand the problem they are seeking to solve, leading to highly effective and optimised decision-making.
