(Photo credit:The Weather Company (http://www.theweathercompany.com/newsroom/2015/01/26/winter-storm-juno-historic-blizzard)

The headlines included words like epic and historic. Worst ever. Crippling. Snowmageddon.

The forecast was dire. States banned travel. Airlines pre-emptively cancelled 7,500 flights, which left countless people stranded or redirected (including my family trying to return from a vacation in Italy).

By now, you know what happened. Winter Storm Juno is being mocked with hashtags, such as #SnowFail and #Snowperbole. It’s the epic storm that wasn’t.

In the days after failures, it becomes a parlor game to assign blame. A CNN report suggests people were trying to out-drama each other. Following Rahm Emmanuel’s point about never letting a crisis go to waste, both sides of the climate change debate leveraged the forecast to champion their viewpoint. Some have suggested The Weather Channel over-hyped the event for ratings.

The Real Problem

However, I refuse to blame the National Weather Service, politicians, or news anchors. They may have over-zealously stirred the pot to make things worse, but here’s the real problem that project managers need to be reminded of: we stink at predicting the future.

A host of cognitive biases works against our ability to see the future. The affect heuristic can cause us to fall in love with an idea or approach. It would be easy for a news channel to get emotionally invested in an impending crisis while struggling to see disconfirming data. The confirmation bias is similar—we choose the data or model that confirms our view of the future. The saliency bias overly weights past memorable events in our predictions. If there’s political punishment for an elected official being under-prepared for a past disaster, you can bet they’ll over-do it next time.

Whether it’s the direction of financial markets, global temperatures in 25 years, or the expected project delivery date, we are notoriously bad at predicting what’s going to happen. Our sight is more impaired than we realize. Yet despite our fails, we love trying to predict what’s going to happen. And since bad predictions often end up not being punished, there’s little incentive to change.

How Can Leaders Respond?

Project managers and leaders face a conundrum. Our organizations aren’t asking for weather forecasts, but they do demand estimates for tasks, delivery dates, budgets, and resource needs. Though it’s tempting to fall in love with the #NoEstimates movement, I find it’s the rare manager who’s ready to embrace that mindset.

So what are we to do? Here are three ideas:

• Anticipate instead of Predict. Rob-Jan de Jong recently published an intriguing book entitled Anticipate: The Art of Leading by Looking Ahead. In my discussion with Rob, he recommends we should focus more on anticipating than predicting. The latter can assume we know more than we do. The former acknowledges uncertainty and causes us to identify multiple futures, allowing us to come up with various plans depending on how the future plays out. Rob developed a process called FuturePriming which, when combined with Scenario Planning, helps us anticipate the future and connect the dots to develop plans for the scenarios.
• Break the Work Into Smaller Pieces. In The Procrastination Equation, author Piers Steel takes a scientific (and entertaining) look at why we delay in taking action. The longer the task, the more we drag our feet (sometimes referred to as Student Syndrome). He recommends breaking the work down into smaller pieces, which provides incremental opportunity for the Student Syndrome to work for you. Classic project management instructs us to break work down into more manageable chunks (also known as a work breakdown structure). When you need to forecast the future, break the work down into smaller units of work (I recommend a week or less). Estimating smaller tasks can be more accurate.
• Set Tripwires. In their excellent book Decisive: How to Make Better Decisions in Life and Work, Chip and Dan Heath’s decision-making process ends with a step entitled, “Prepare to be Wrong.” They suggest setting a tripwire to avoid letting a bad decision become even worse. Let’s say someone on your team is responsible to deliver a critical path task estimated to take 2 weeks. Instead of waiting until the due date to check on progress, set some tripwires along the way for early warnings of problems. When asked to anticipate future events, consider setting some key milestones as tripwires to provide more informed updates.

Here’s to Your Future

Was it better to be safe than sorry? Perhaps the biggest danger of Winter Storm Juno morphing into a joke is that we’ll discount future storm forecasts. If you leave town enough times because of hurricanes that don’t show up, you’re more likely to stay put. In business, if our estimates become a joke we inevitably lose credibility, and credibility is currency.

There’s no foolproof way to predict the future. But a sure-fire way to set ourselves up for failure is to assume our predictions are accurate. That approach might just earn us a mocking hashtag in our honor!

You’re invited to join the conversation! What’s your take on what led to the epic storm that wasn’t? How do you try to account for uncertainty when you need to anticipate the future? Please share your comments below.