Month / August 2017

by Roger Dennis

Things creep up on you…

The Financial Times has published an article on the death of retail in the USA.  In addition to being an interesting read about the impact of technology on jobs, it also contains a great quote about the risk of not having a view over the horizon, and the boiling frog effect:

Wayne Wicker, chief investment officer of ICMA-RC, a pension fund for US public sector workers says “These things creep up on you, and suddenly you realise there’s trouble. That’s when people panic and run for the exit.”

I’m betting that senior teams in the companies mentioned in the article have been sitting in their comfortable paradigms for too long, and their own biases have been filtering signposts that may have helped anticipate what’s coming.

by Roger Dennis

Tools for thinking about the future

This HBR article from a couple of years ago has some good techniques for helping make better bets about how the future might evolve for a specific outcomes.  They would be useful when you’re at the pointy end of a scenario exercise, rather than at the start.  The entire piece is a worthwhile read, and my three main relevant takeaways can be summarised as:

  1. When estimating data points that may occur in the future, make three estimates – one high, one low, and then, by extension, one that falls in the middle.  The middle estimate is much more likely to be accurate.
  2. In a similar fashion, make two estimates about future data points, then take the average.  Note that it’s important to take a break between making the two estimates in order to avoid bias.
  3. Create a premortem i.e. imagine a future failure and then explain the cause.