Predictions, Prophets, and Restarting Your Business

This article was originally posted in Harvard Business School’s Working Knowledge on May 4, 2020.
Businesses are starting to plan their re-entry into the market, but how do they know what that market will look like? Frank V. Cespedes warns against putting too much trust in forecasters.
“Predictions are risky, especially about the future,” according to a popular expression. Still, business is inescapably about the future—that’s what managers’ decisions are about. In the current crisis, we have daily grand predictions about “new normals,” and managers must restart their business and make decisions based on assumptions about the future.
The problem: Most of these prophecies about what is to come are basically straight-line extrapolations of a few weeks of data or sermons about what that prophet believes should happen. These won’t be of much use to business leaders making cold, hard decisions about returning to the market.
Here’s a common prediction: Social distancing forces people