The organisation has a corrosive addiction to prediction

The modern organisation is addicted to prediction.

We will deliver $112,298,000 in revenue. We will have 3,373,382 customers. We will have 4,023,934 app downloads. And here is the budget spreadsheet with 736 line items that will get us there.

It feels good. It is human to dislike uncertainty, so it is natural we want to predict the future as much as possible. It creates comfort in the present.

But in the modern organisation, prediction is a case of repeated self-delusion: we get it wrong far more often than we get it right, because we are trying to make predictions about things like how easy it will be to integrate disparate technologies, or what customers, politicians, competitors, and other groups of humans will do. We can make informed guesses, but prediction is foolish: we are making predictions about human behaviour in spaces where we control almost nothing.

What does the organisation control? Where it invests its money, and that’s pretty much it.

It does not control the output from that investment: some things go well, others do not.

And it does not control whether anyone will consume that output. Consumer confidence fluctuates, an unexpected social media trend changes preferences on a dime for a time: there are countless unknowable and unpredictable variables.

But the modern organisation tends to ignore this entirely. It takes the one element it can control and predict - investment - and makes it the nucleus of the ubiquitous ‘strategic planning process’. Before you know it, the process has produced a budget with specific costs for specific activities in specific teams in specific departments, neatly fitting into the budget envelope set by the CFO or CEO. A veneer of strategic intent sits on top in pillar or horizon form; those items that appear on the page doing so because they did not challenge the investment prediction exercise.

But most destructive is that we don’t hold this prediction lightly. Not at all. Rather, we pour concrete all over it. Individual leaders are informed of their individual budgets, not as something indicative to be shaped as the year plays out, but as iron-clad, often stated with an expected sense of gratitude during another ‘tough year’ for budgets.

And so, leaders begin spending, often immediately and entirely to ensure everything is committed and nothing is available when the CFO comes knocking for claw-backs later in the year. To break the concrete and reallocate investment becomes a near-intractable task.

This small delusion of prediction is a root cause for some epic work-about-work, as leaders wearing concrete boots begin to dance:

The unlucky leader with an explosion of work due to unexpected market conditions launches a campaign of emails and meetings seeking support. The anxious leader wanting to sandbag their budget begins a soft campaign to sow discontent about another team, aiming to shut down work and redirect their budget. That department is now investing their time in a defensive campaign, and the interpersonal friction is creating conflict for line managers to soothe. Meanwhile, the inspired product leader who has sensed an emerging tech trend cannot contort the research & development budget that was allocated with undue prophecy almost a year ago. She begins to build a coalition, begging subject matter experts to join her to build a case, as she begins setting up meetings with senior management.

All of this, because the budget is a prediction that does not sense nor respond to the present. It is an indulgence that fuels work-about-work as much as it suffocates adaptation and innovation.

The answer starts with a question:

As a percentage, how confident are you that your specific budget allocation will achieve all of your objectives?

I am yet to meet a CEO or CFO who tells me, “100% confident!” Some will say, “Well, my people are confident, so I am confident!” Nope, that’s a cop out (and I assure you with, ironically, 100% certainty, they are far from 100% confident). How confident are you? The answer again has never been 100%.

I’ve been told 90%, 80%, one CEO shared with candid honesty that he was just 50% confident. That gap is what I call your prediction risk margin. This is a loose indicator of how much your investments might need to change during the year in response to what happens, as time reveals previous unknowns of the opportunistic and problematic varieties.

And the best news is that just one change does a lot of heavy lifting to address this: hold your Prediction Risk Margin in a central, contestable pool of investment. Spending $100m and 90% confident in your budget prediction? Hold $10m and make it accessible to all departments and teams to pitch for investment, once a month or once a quarter, you’ll know which is right to try.

And can’t do this as an organisation? Do it for your team. Take what you learn and share with others. Take the lessons from a few teams and share with the CEO and CFO. One percent more joyous each month is a revelation in a few years. Starting, however small, is all that matters.

Want to take this to the next level? I have shared previously the power of binding identity to mission, as opposed to a high-definition job. When you do this and combine with a little bit more flex in your budget, you are taking huge strides towards organising effort and investment around the things that matter most right now, and attacking work-about-work at the root cause level.

Change is a swarm of hacks. It’s not set-and-forget—it’s try-listen-try.

One percent better each month is an absolute revelation in time. Joyous work is within your reach. You can start now.

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At Joyous Work, we help organisations of all sizes to identify and eliminate the work-about-work that suffocates people from executing their crafts. Consistently joyous and super-productive work is closer than you might think. Visit joyouswork.com or reach out to john@joyouswork.com.