Not All Predictions Are Created Equal
It has been over 100 days since the official beginning of the Covid-19 epidemic and Wuhan has just exited lockdown. Companies are beginning to come to terms with being virtual and are starting to develop new ways of working. Already there are discussions about life PC19 (post-Covid-19). For example, Yuval Noah Harari’s Financial Times article and the Foreign Policy panel discussion were among the first discussions I came across in the mainstream English-speaking world. In addition, various futurists and strategists, such as Futures Platform, have released tools and projections about the post-Covid-19 world. In the coming days and months, there will be a steadily growing outpouring of words on what the future will be like. Some of them will be scary. Some will be optimistic and most will be somewhere in between. The majority of them will, unfortunately, be wrong. The question is why; why is it that so many predictions are wrong and, more importantly, why it is that some are accurate.
Paradigms as a predictive tool for transformations
In order to understand how to make more accurate predictions, it is useful to look at the difference between the process of change and what can be called “normal times”. We experience normal times as being linear and predictable: if I do this and that, I will get a known result. This is because there is a stability to the situation that allows us to draw on past experiences and, with attention, translate these experiences into the future. This stability also allows us to have some certainty in being able to change from one position to another. We know that if we increase our marketing and improve our production process, we can grow our revenue and profits by a certain percentage year on year.
Not all change, however, is linear. When it is transformative, it is a dynamic and, at times, chaotic system of relationships and influences. Novelty and uncertainty are its key characteristics. New technologies, evolving customer demands, shifting economic models and political structures disrupt everything. In this environment, the past is not a reliable guide and therefore predictions based on the past are likely to be wildly inaccurate.
This is not to say that transformation is completely unstructured and unknowable. It is a cycle that has phases. Drawing from Thomas Kuhn’s seminal book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, we can identify three stages to what he calls the paradigm: its emergence, maintenance and collapse. In his model, the collapse of one paradigm overlaps with the emergence of another one. The paradigm is built around addressing a particular issue. It consists of rules that determine what those in the paradigm should address and the types of answers that should be given. There are also educational and regulatory structures that help people to think like a member of the paradigm.
For example, we can look at copyright law as a paradigm. Within the larger paradigm of the law, there is a group of people who are focused on the issue of managing the economic aspects of creating and distributing physical works of art, primarily books. There is an educational process for people who want to be part of this community where they learn how to “think” like copyright lawyers. There are also various processes for self-policing the activities of the community, determining that this or that case, for example, relates to copyright law or not.
Paradigms and the post-Covid-19 future
So how can the paradigm process help us make more accurate predictions about the future?
By looking for indicators of where we are in the paradigmatic cycle, we can start making some predictions of the direction things are going, even if we cannot necessarily see what shape the new paradigm will take.
For example, one of the characteristics of the paradigm collapse and emergence of a new one is an increase in people and groups claiming the “mantle of resistance”. In the disruption of a collapse, there are those who feel threatened by the changes that are occurring and want things to return to the way they were. The more that they react to the changes and attempt to stop the tide, the more others resist them. This dynamic relationship of resistance intensifies creating polarization and escalating conflict, through both propaganda and direct confrontation. In the context of copyright, direct conflict manifests through an increase in court cases as the shape and direction of the law are contested.
In the current situation, we can see that the impact of the pandemic and our responses to it are not happening in isolation, but are a profound shock that has accelerated an already existing paradigm transformation. The environmental, economic and political issues that we had struggled with in the last couple of years have not gone away. In fact, the pandemic has rocket-fueled the disruptions that caused movements as diverse as Extinction Rebellion and Make America Great Again to appear.
As a result, the prediction that things will “go back to normal” once the lockdowns have lifted is unlikely to come true. There may be a temporary effort to return to the way things were, but the disruptions have become too big to contain. In fact, the desire to “return to the way things were” will only fuel the cycle of resistance as people realise that we cannot go back and begin to use more force to stem the tide of change. This will then be met with opposition from those who do not see a benefit in going back. In the end, there is increased polarization and conflict until a new paradigm eventually emerges and stablises.
