IN THE LAST ELECTIONS, with some surprise winners and losers, political analysts and self-proclaimed experts of all stripes came out of the woodwork to explain what happened. It’s a tradition in the field of personal contests to extract lessons on what went wrong or right. The pre-election polls now seem to be discredited as predictive tools after exposing their erroneous listings of winners and losers in the contest.
In his 2012 book Antifragile: Things that gain from Disorder, author Nassim Nicholas Taleb dismisses the notion of planning for the future based on analyzing the past. Such an approach is what he calls “postdiction,” which he considers an idle and irrelevant meditation on what already happened. Prediction, on the other hand, should deal with the future.
Events are no longer linear and what happened before will not necessarily happen again even in some modified form. In a discontinuous world, old trends seldom repeat themselves. Even the alliances and personalities can change.
Is hindsight completely useless? Doesn’t a good driver need both the windshield and the rearview mirror to maneuver through traffic? Let’s not forget the side mirror for those overtaking motorcycles.
In a murder mystery, hindsight solves the puzzle. The story opens with a corpse. From here, our trusty detective tries to reconstruct the victim’s life and how he died. This leads him to look at motives, activities, rivalries, and possible suspects around the victim.
The postmortem (or “after death”) is a favorite approach in the murder mystery. The autopsy provides details of how death occurred (trajectory of the knife, choke marks on the neck, dinner residue in the stomach) and even how it might have taken place.
Basketball coaches study videos of defeats to analyze what went wrong. A blowout in the first quarter leaving a team behind by 20 points can be an occasion to take to task the players responsible for turnovers, weak defensive plays allowing easy points, or poor shooting by the starters. (Why do you keep hoisting the low-percentage perimeter shots?) The adjustments in player rotation and game plans are results of studying the past game. The lessons are learned, and adjustments are made. Do winners also review tapes to check how well they did?
In the MBA using the case-method for discussion and analysis, the hindsight approach is also dominant. The postmortem of the corporate corpse (or near-corpse) provides the points for discussion. A real company and its woes are presented for analysis to understand the dynamics of decision-making and priority-setting in a crisis.
Management theories are applied to the facts of the case. The corporate situation, however, is sanitized to exclude extraneous forces like family affiliations, favoritism, political machinations, and the envy of peers. Such details are considered irrelevant in the academic exercise… but not in real life.
In any corporate planning session, the starting point seems to be past numbers. The facilitator steps back and plays detective with what happened the year before, perhaps also looking for suspects. (Do we need a succession plan?) The “situation analysis” starts the ball rolling in determining future moves.
Using hindsight in electoral analysis may still be useful in spotting socio-political trends such as the impact of feuding groups, endorsements of a religious sect, the rise of social media in influencing opinion, the lessening advantage of celebrity status, the waning influence of traditional media except perhaps billboards, and the growing number of young voters.
Those who read history will insist that it has lessons to teach us even in modern times. The rise of a dictator and his well-defined personality as a hate-spewing leader that launches attacks on minority groups, erodes freedom of expression, and picks fights with other countries can be valuable takeaways in dealing with the present.
Using hindsight to determine future strategy tends to select trends that support preconceived ideas (or obsessions). This selective bias tends to promote pet theories and conspiracies already held for a long time.
An undue reliance on hindsight and what went wrong (or right) can overlook what events to prepare for, especially in a discontinuous future with trends and surprises not yet encountered before… like a flock of black swans.
Tony Samson is chairman and CEO of TOUCH xda
