In times of geopolitical instability, rapid technological change, and overlapping crises, it’s increasingly hard to make confident claims about what regions or countries will look like five or ten years from now. And yet, confident predictions persist.
You still hear statements like, “This country will thrive because of X,” or “That region will decline because of Y.” They’re often delivered with impressive certainty, even when the underlying conditions are clearly volatile.
From a futures perspective, this is less puzzling than it seems. Prediction doesn’t just serve an analytical function. It also serves an emotional one. Certainty is reassuring. Confidence travels well. But ambiguity? That’s uncomfortable and difficult to communicate. It’s hard to sell to the “public”, even if we (the public) say we want transparency (from those in leadership positions).
(As an aside, I recently had a conversation with a surgeon who asked about how to communicate uncertainty. His challenge? He knows that he doesn’t have all the answers, but in the world of surgeons, confidence is credibility: saying “I’m not sure” not only lowers credibility with peers, but also with patients. how many patients really want to hear from their doctor, “Well, we’ve done some tests and we need to operate but we’re at all certain that what we’ll be doing will solve the problem. Let’s give it a go and see what happens.”? I digress.)
Back to futures and predictions: there’s also a temporal asymmetry at play. By the time a prediction is proven wrong, attention has usually moved on. The cost of being confidently incorrect is surprisingly low.
In futures facilitation, this shows up in group dynamics too. People often reward confidence over humility, even when uncertainty would be the more honest stance. Scenarios get treated as forecasts. Possibilities harden into expectations.
One of the less “shouty” aims of futures work, as I see it, is to build tolerance for uncertainty. We need to make it possible to say “we don’t know yet” without that being experienced as failure. I know that this may be less satisfying than a bold prediction. But it’s often more useful, both in the present and in the long term.