Leaders Need to Stop Pretending They Can Predict the Future

Flip through cable news, and within minutes, you’re bound to stumble across an expert projecting certainty about AI’s impact on jobs, whether the Democrats will flip the House, or when the war in Iran will end.

Alas, as psychology professor Philip Tetlock, who evaluated decades of expert predictions in politics and economics, famously found, “the average expert was roughly as accurate as a dart-throwing chimpanzee.”

In times of great uncertainty, certainty is ever more alluring. Believing that we can predict the future gives us a sense of control as the ground shifts beneath us. And yet, it is precisely in these times of precarity that leaders must trade their hubris for humility.

Too often, we underappreciate the value of uncertainty. We tend to assume that expressing unwavering conviction breeds credibility, but several studies have found that those who admit what they don’t know are perceived as more credible.