We’ve recently experimented with writing "anti-predictions" instead of forecasts. But when it comes to organizational decision making, here’s what we’ve concluded about predictions.
Every January, organizations are buried in predictions. Trend reports, survey findings, year-ahead analyses: all of them rushing to answer what will happen before anyone has asked why it matters.
Predictions can be fun, standing at the threshold of a new year. It invites reflection and imagination worth pondering. We do it too, privately: over coffee, in client conversations, in the margins of whatever we’re reading. What’s coming? What changes? What holds?
The threshold of a new year also brings something less enjoyable: a pressure to react, to respond, to get ahead of whatever’s coming. That urgency? Not so fun.
We stopped writing predictions a while ago. Not because the future isn’t interesting, but because we’ve noticed that the organizations struggling most aren’t failing to anticipate what was coming, per se. They’re the ones who never got clear on what they were trying to accomplish in the first place.
The noise is real. Leaders are making decisions — about AI, about where and how people work, about culture and belonging — inside an environment that is faster, louder, and more politically charged than it has ever been. The pressure to respond has never been greater. So, organizations react. They announce. They reverse. They announce again.
What we watch for, instead of predictions, is discipline. Specifically: who is asking what for before deciding what.
When the debate is pro/con — RTO yes or no, AI threat or opportunity, invest in culture or cut the budget — the first question often gets skipped. Not should we do this, but what are we trying to achieve? Organizations that hold that question get somewhere. Organizations that skip it tend to get busy and then lose the plot.
There’s a second thing we watch for, and it’s related: who is protecting the conditions that make good thinking possible. Information is not the scarcity. Time and space to think about what the information means? That’s what is scarce. The organizations worth watching aren’t the fastest reactors. They’re the ones that have made it structurally possible for their people to ask hard questions, test assumptions, and arrive at conclusions that are actually connected to reality.
What does asking what for look like in practice? It sounds like three questions asked early, before the work gets underway:
What is this for?
Who does it serve?
How do we want people to feel when it’s over?
Simple questions. Harder to answer than they look. And when organizations can answer them clearly, the what and the how tend to follow.
The noise won’t slow down. The pressure to react will only grow. The question that separates the organizations worth watching from the ones just staying busy is the same one it’s always been.
What for?
Predictions Are Easy. We Start with a Different Question.
Predictions are one thing. But the most savvy organizational leaders ask what for before they decide what next. If you're standing on the threshold of something big, we can probably help. Let's chat.