Are our predictions right?
Debajit Ghosh
Founder: Sundarbon - Reimagining Education for Real-World Readiness | Oil & Gas Industry Leader | Certified Director & ESG Specialist | Investor | Mentor | Open to Board Roles and Startup Opportunities
Suddenly bumped into an old interview of Elon Musk (I am his biggest fan) on price of oil and Tata Nano and was wondering how oil never touched 200$/bbl (till now) and Tata Nano never became a mass car.
This made me reflect, as a lifelong student of science, I always believed on the importance of reason and logic, based on facts, verified by measured data as key in decision making and planning the next course of action. But many a times those data/facts are based on recent (past) events, and not cover every possible perspective (or a very small fraction of what can be measured is measured), and as a result may lead to wide off the mark prediction. Also, new competition, new regulation and new customer intelligence always emerging that can not be measured from past data.
Coming to recent events, when the pandemic started last year, all the news on economy and its likely recovery path, focus on climate policies, EV growth forecast etc (that we read last year) were widely conflicting to what we read today (from well-known think tanks). Specially the ones that are purely based on data, even though not much have changed in our understanding of how everything is related, and the likely solutions (eg everyone last year knew we will print more money, lower interest rates, develop vaccine)
As an alternative, may be extrapolation based on simple observation of the situation, an instinctive gut feeling of how everything is related, judgement based on smart imagination at the same time coupled with fact and data provides better insight. This also need room for lot of thinking, deliberation, trialing, and keeping room for error. Our relentless push to work SMART and set SMART goals (even though I like them in specific situations), can sometimes become bottleneck in this process, and may act as enabler to hold on to stale ideas and predictions (as it doesn’t allow much room to think, observe and create)
Regional Geologist | Structural Geologist | Exploration Geoscientist| New Access Manager | Energy Professional
4yExcellent Debu da. I mostly agree with your arguments. However to me, to become SMART, our system pushes us more towards ‘judging’ rather than ‘thinking’. Because, whatever they say, thinking requires some quiet time and no one is ready to give some in professional world