Source: J Brooks Spector, Daily Maverick, 3 January 2022, photo credit: Georgia Tech Professional Education
What will be the big events and trends for the new year that deserve serious consideration, but are right alongside any black swans that can overturn those predictions?
“Prediction is difficult, especially about the future” is the famous observation about life attributed to everyone from physicist Neils Bohr and Mark Twain to baseball’s king of malapropisms, Yogi Berra. But black swan events can also crop up and confound us. As those recede into the past and we see them in our rear view mirror, they eventually are judged as the inevitable outcomes of what has gone before and intriguingly we begin accepting them as part of the historical landscape.
The challenge is how to see trends in such a way that we can understand the antecedents – before they are seen as inevitable. This, then, is the political and economic analogue of what psychologist William James famously described as the “booming, buzzing confusion” of sensations that assail a newborn child.
Clem Sunter, the South African scenario planner, explained his methodology for developing scenarios about the future as follows. His team used a roster of triggers and red flags to help weigh alternatives and provide those “heads ups” about problematic developments and policy choices.
When I asked what the most significant red flags were, he said to check the interest rates on a government’s long-term bonds: are they going up or down? The higher the interest rates demanded and paid, the more it is a predictor for future instability.
For another approach, Foreign Affairs now asks panels of recognised experts to judge the likelihood of a particular trend that they have identified among international issues in order to “crowdsource” predictions. It publishes the distribution of opinions on the back page of each issue. Meanwhile, The Economist, in its annual look ahead to a new year, uses another version of crowdsourcing, asking influential scholars, commentators and analysts for their views of the key trends for the coming year.
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The South African Pork Producers’ Organisation (SAPPO) coordinates industry interventions and collaboratively manages risks in the value chain to enable the sustainability and profitability of pork producers in South Africa.
