Sweating Less About the Future: Why Direction Beats Prediction

The industry does not need more predictions. It needs more leaders who can read the present with accuracy and act with intention to shape a better future.

As I explored in Part One, we are surprisingly terrible at predicting the future, despite our professional obligation to try. What's increasingly clear is that the burden of forecasting doesn't come from the actual process, but from the idea that predictions must be precise. You cannot predict the exact moment a shift will break through. You can only read the direction of travel and sense whether the world is warming up or cooling down. Strategy lives in that sensing.

Why the Mind Struggles With the Future

Part of this fatigue is cognitive. As both Kahneman and Gigerenzer show us, human intuition is extraordinary at sensing emerging patterns, emotional weather and the subtle changes that precede disruption. But humans are useless at probability. We are creatures of narrative rather than mathematics. Intuition gives us insight into shape, direction and possibility, but not odds or timing.

Meanwhile, AI excels at statistics but cannot imagine anything genuinely new. It can refine a curve but not invent it. The future is not solved by one intelligence or the other, but by the partnership between them. Human imagination sets intent and senses direction. Machine intelligence estimates scale and probability.

The Mid-Term Zone: Where I Get Big Things Done

Big, meaning meaningful. This is where I find my real strategic flair: the mid-term horizon, the space where you cannot control everything, but you can still shape something. It is the territory where timing is fuzzy but influence is very possible, where acting early matters more than predicting precisely.

It was during one such moment that we began working with Virgin Active during the pandemic, adapting their value proposition as fitness habits shifted permanently. This kind of work lives in the space between certainty and chaos, where directional clarity matters more than calendar precision.

My Year Compass has once again put fitness back on my agenda. For the year, not the ceremonial first three weeks of January.

This matters because I made it well into my forties having successfully avoided gyms. It just wasn't my thing.

Then Joe Webb happened.

Joe is my personal trainer and the person who somehow converted me to the genuine joy of training. Not guilt. Not obligation. Actual enjoyment. Thanks to him, fitness is no longer a January experiment but a year-round practice. He keeps me honest, stronger than I expect, and constantly reminds me that knowing what to do is not the same as doing it.

A lesson that applies far beyond the gym.

And it raises a much bigger question: If the magic comes from the right intervention at the right moment, how do you scale that experience without losing the human edge?

Our product whiz Katherine, who built the original Virgin Active app, believes the winners will be the gyms that use agentic systems to create a boutique experience at scale. Imagine machines that adjust resistance automatically to your plan, augmented overlays that improve your form and count reps, and human PT support that appears at exactly the right moment. Sometimes you need reassurance. Sometimes you need a drill sergeant. Both matter.

When Prediction Becomes Prejudice

Even good intuition needs handling with care. The same fast thinking that allows leaders to move decisively relies on heuristics, mental shortcuts we use to navigate complexity when time and information are limited. They are not flaws. They are adaptations.

The trouble starts when heuristics harden. When they stop being hypotheses and start behaving like rules. At that point they slip into bias. And when bias goes unexamined, it turns into stereotype.

This is not intuition failing. It is intuition being confused with something else.

What began as pattern recognition becomes pattern imprisonment. Conviction replaces curiosity.

True intuition remains useful precisely because it stays light. It notices without locking in. It invites inquiry rather than closure. Intuition becomes misused when we stop questioning what kind of signal we are actually hearing.

Signals That Show Direction Matters More Than Precision

Look at DoughGirl, the bakery launched this year on TikTok Shop that has already had to increase production capacity six-fold to keep up with demand. Retail media was always going to rise, whether in brand-owned channels or within the social ecosystem. The precise timing? Unpredictable. The direction? Inevitable. The leaders who moved early were not the ones with the best predictions; they were the ones with the clearest sense of direction.

The Deep Root of Prediction Fatigue

Prediction fatigue does not come from uncertainty itself. Humans are actually quite good at not knowing. We live with it every day.

What we struggle with is patternlessness.

At a root level, our brains are compulsive gap-fillers. When the future refuses to behave, we start doodling narratives in the margins. Trends. Timelines. Suspiciously tidy roadmaps. Anything that makes the unknown look briefly well-behaved.

We love routine. It soothes us. It always has. And when reality stops offering it, we invent our own.

The trouble begins when we mistake these comfort patterns for foresight. We treat uncertainty as a personal failure rather than the default state of reality. We were never meant to see the future clearly, despite what that one slide in every strategy deck keeps implying.

The relief arrives when we stop demanding clairvoyance from ourselves and start trusting our ability to read the present with a little more sensitivity and a little less theatre.

Directional clarity is enough. Timing has always been part judgment, part negotiation, part circumstance, regardless of how confidently anyone says "Q3." The real shift comes when we stop performing foresight and start practising awareness.

The Provocation

Next, we will explore what it means to operate in a world where machines increasingly mediate human intention. Where decisions are shaped by digital proxies as much as by people. And where brands may need to earn the trust of algorithms before they ever reach a human being.

So here is a provocation to carry with you.

What will you do when the AI disagrees with you?

When the model is confident, articulate and persuasive, but your intuition pulls in a different direction. When the data points one way and your judgement points another.

Will you defer?

Will you challenge it?

Or will you use that tension as the signal that something genuinely new is trying to emerge?

A new year. A new paradigm.

The work ahead will be messy, uncomfortable and very much alive.

Which is precisely what makes it fun.