Sometime before the December 31st deadline, the various media presented a deluge of “annual predictions” from almost every company, news pundit, blogger and more, all forecasting what 2010 will bring. And, January 2010 has followed suit with another avalanche of bogus prognostications, which most will end up to be.

And yet, despite the bad record of these crystal ball gazers, we all devour these predictions as though we could wish them to come true. In point of fact, most all such predictions are just pretty much little more than the proverbial “Blah, Blah, Blah.”

Why do we get things so wrong? One answer could be that people are just not held accountable for wrong predictions. But the more correct one is that we tend to base our predictions on what we think we know, on what has happened in the past, and on a trend we believe will continue. While that may have made sense in more stable times, the chaos theory points out that the past cannot be counted on to predict the future. To put it in another context, Harvard economist Lawrence Katz noted on the issue of jobs in The Wall Street Journal, “One thing we’ve learned is that when we attempt to forecast jobs 10 or 15 years out, we don’t even get the categories right.” The very idea behind this thought is that we cannot rely on the past or on trends, alone. Yes, they are important as input, but we need to have more and better information from the broader spectrum of the competitive landscape.

Good competitive intelligence should focus not so much on what these predictions have missed, as on what they had failed to take into account. That makes all the difference.
I point to some of the more famous failed predictions and their consequences in my book, Competitive Intelligence Advantage. Any number of people over the ages have predicted the end of inventions, including the US Patent Office Commissioner, Charles Duell, who wanted to close down the office in 1899. What he failed to realize is that, as L. Gordon Crovitz said, “The more we invent, the more we invent.”

There have been many predictions and statements that are almost unimaginable in hindsight. Bill Gates, in his 1995 book The Road Ahead, said that the Internet is a fad — a statement that was deleted in subsequent editions. Have a good laugh with these:

• “The Americans have need of the telephone, but we do not. We have plenty of messenger boys.” Sir William Preece, British Post Office, 1878
•  “Space travel is bunk,” according to Astronomer Royal Sir Harold Spencer Jones in 1957, and two weeks later, Sputnik orbited the Earth.
• Variety opined that rock ‘n roll “will be gone by June 1955.”
•  In 1967, David Riesman, noted American social scientist, said that if anything remains more or less unchanged, it will be the role of women.
• “With over fifteen types of foreign cars already on sale here, the Japanese auto industry isn’t likely to carve out a big share of the market for itself.” Business Week, August 2, 1968.

So, if you want to look into the future to grow your business and gain a competitive advantage, move away from the microscope that most predictors use, and start looking through a macroscope that sees the larger picture. You are more likely to get it right, and less likely to spout the usual “blah, blah, blah!”

Seena Sharp of Sharp Market Intelligence is my long-time colleague who identifies your competitive edge by uncovering opportunities, threats and growth segments. Visit Seena at www.sharpmarket.com, and download the free chapter in Seena Sharp’s new book, Competitive Intelligence Advantage: How to Minimize Risk, Avoid Surprises, and Grow Your Business in a Changing World (Wiley) http://bit.ly/8XLKmj.  And read the great Amazon reviews http://bit.ly/5FCHtL .

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