“Oh, What I Could Tell You About The Future!”

 

When Emmitt “Doc” Brown utters this line in Back to the Future III, he’s in a saloon in the old (American) west, circa 1885, talking to patrons who listen to his (correct) descriptions of the future with derision. Brown’s descriptions strike them as absurd.

And why wouldn’t they?  In 1885:

·         The pathogen theory of disease transmission was just becoming widely known.

·         Georgia had more people than California.

·         The Statue of Liberty arrived in New York.

·         The mini-Ice Age, which had started around 1300, had just ended.

·         All glass was hand-blown.

·         Teddy Roosevelt was 28 years old.

·         And the list of stuff we take for granted today that hadn’t even been conceived of is prohibitively long for a blog post.

Granted, Back to the Future III is fiction; but the notion that the way the real future unfolds would strike people in history as absurd, I think, is spot-on. It then stands to reason that, should some time traveler come back from our future to the year 2014, his descriptions would strain credulity. That being the case, what should we make of predictions of the future that strike us as entirely reasonable?

During the aforementioned mini-Ice Age, farmers in Northern Europe had quite the challenge. In order to maximize their crop yields, they had to be able to time their ploughing and planting in such a way as to keep their seedlings from freezing (should they plant too soon), but also provide enough time for their crops to ripen before the first freeze of the next Autumn. Correctly timing their crop cycles was literally a life-and-death decision for them and their loved ones. Despite being blessed with no access to climatologists, they still needed to be able to base their decisions on something more than the cycles they had observed in the immediate past. Under a belief that wild animals would often act differently when the last freeze had been encountered, an entire structure of data collection based on such observations became the basis for these critical decisions. Sprinkle in a bit of formality, and a couple of hundred years, and you have the spectacle of men dressed in formal attire gathering on February 2 in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, to pull from its den an unwilling member of Marmota momax to “predict” either six more weeks of winter, or an “early” spring.

Now, imagine if I had left out the description of the medieval Northern European farmers’ need to somehow divine the planting season, and also imagine you had never heard of the celebration of Groundhog Day. The question virtually asks itself: is this any way to predict the future?

I suppose it’s appropriate for the December ProjectManagement.com theme to be the Future of Project Management, since every other writer for every other publication uses this time to make predictions. But that’s my point – any attempt to predict the future is simply an extension of our own prejudices and recent past into an unknowable environment. I could predict the outlandish, that someone will come up with a profound breakthrough in the management sciences, but then be hit by falling orbital debris while on her way to publish the findings. Or I could be safe, and predict that the presentations from the next year’s management seminars will be evenly split between those espousing the amazing success of their own particular projects, made possible, don’t you know, by their own insightful embracing of current management techniques, and those who re-package the basics in new presentations, while retaining the eat-your-peas-style that so pervades such presentations.

Or, I could be perfectly honest, and admit: I have no idea what the future of project management looks like.

And my readers should hold as suspect anyone who claims to the contrary.