I feel another
rant coming on and it’s all to do with the stupidity or political mind games of
those politicians who insist on being told the Government’s plans for the
Brexit negotiations.
Let me state my
stance here. I voted remain because
while I am less than happy about the impact of the EU bureaucracy on this
country, on balance the fact that we have had peace in Europe for 70years is a
massive plus.
However, the
country voted to leave the EU on June 23rd and that should be
accepted as the will of the people.
There are some “remainers” who
think that we should now have another referendum to overturn the original so
why not a third and then we can take the best of three?
They seem to be
the same lot who use statistics to prove their point and frequently very
suspect statistics, let it be said. What
is worse they argue on the basis of these dubious numbers that everyone is
wrong except themselves.
The Autumn
Statement by the Chancellor last week is a typical example. Using the predictions from the Office for
Budget Responsibility he forecast several years of doom and gloom to come.
Very possibly
correct and just as possibly completely incorrect. My old friend economist and revered Vistage
speaker, Roger Martin-Fagg says on the basis of his considerable experience that
any economic forecast has two alternative results:
“Either you are wrong or you are lucky”.
How on earth can
we possibly predict the future accurately?
Take the example of the polls over the last couple of years.
Examine the
predictions for the last General Election, the EU Referendum, the US
Presidential election and more recently, the primary for the conservative
candidate in the French Presidential election.
In every case the
polls, and even the polls of polls, were significantly wrong and certainly not
lucky.
Take for instance
the way that they use sampling techniques.
Obviously the polls can’t check with everyone in the universe so they
resort to taking an acceptable sample of the population and asking them their
intentions.
The number of
people in the sample depends on the margin of acceptable error in the results
and that can be as high as plus or minus 2%/
The point is that
all polls work on this “accepted margin
of error” which they try to mitigate by weighting the results for age,
gender, ethnicity, regions, demographics and so on.
Naturally the
individual polls guard this information jealously and they don’t normally admit
that given a plus/minus percent or two the results can and indeed are
dramatically different.
The recent lack of
anything approaching realistic forecasting has now led to a general dismissal
of virtually anything that the polls predict and given Roger Martin-Fagg’s
strictures they certainly weren’t lucky.
How much store can
we have then given the forecasts of any organisation especially one that has
political leanings?
Very little I
would suggest. Remember that most of
these predictions are PESTLE, (Political, Economic, Sociological, Technological,
Legal and Environmental). These are the ones that we in business can do nothing
about other than try to guess what might happen and plan accordingly or simply wait
and react.
Either way we will
be doing precisely what the Government (of any colour) does.
Another of our
wonderful speakers on the Vistage circuit, ex-CIA executive Herb Meyer says
that:
“No plan can survive its collision with
reality”.
This doesn’t imply
that we shouldn’t plan. It is, however, prudent to have a cultured guess about
what might happen, plan for it and then hang on to your hat.
You might just get
lucky.
Visit the Vistage UK website
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