Awareness and Prediction

tl;dr: Awareness is a muscle to be built. Both for individuals and organizations. The ROI can be very valuable.

I am far from an expert meditator, but there are a few concepts that have resonated as I’ve worked on my practice.

One of them is the mental exercise of “what does the back of your head look like?”

From there, I began to imagine other things that I couldn’t necessarily see, but that doesn’t mean that they weren’t there.

For me, meditation doesn’t have a measurable goal, but it does have benefits. One of them is a focus and commitment to expanding fields of awareness.

The Situational Awareness Difference

This is not just a quaint crunchy granola cheap trick. It turns out that situational awareness is a key determinant in making good decisions about the future.

I’m currently reading Superforecasting : The Art and Science of Prediction by Philip E. Tetlock and Dan Gardner.

Predicting the future is notoriously difficult. The number of people who throw out predictions that are either vague, ill-defined, or poorly thought out is massive. I know I’m guilty of this!

The authors point out that if people don’t give you a timeframe and a measurable indicator of how we will know they are right or not, then you can ignore them. Or you can make money off of them.

Without the hard quantifiers, there’s no way to assess the quality of someone’s predictions over time. So, someone might stay on CNN or Fox but actually never get a prediction right.

To cite one example, the authors bring up the quote of Steve Ballmer about the iPhone.

“There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance. It’s a $500 subsidized item. They may make a lot of money. But if you actually take a look at the 1.3 billion phones that get sold, I’d prefer to have our software in 60 percent or 70 percent or 80 percent of them, than I would to have 2 percent or 3 percent, which is what Apple might get,”—in a 2007 interview with USA Today.

It looks very wrong on the surface. But he was right about something….they did “make a lot of money.”

Yet, according to the authors, there are some people who are not afraid of making predictions with hard deadlines and avoiding vagaries.

They are the “super predictors” and it turns out that their capabilities are also muscles that can be built.

That muscle is having a larger perspective of awareness than what’s right on the tip of their nose.

Developing Awareness

Meditation may be one way of developing awareness, but there are plenty. Inspiration can come in many forms, including a dragonfly.

The authors point out that a little dragonfly has thousands of lenses in its eyes, each pointing at a very slightly different angle.

The benefit of this is like when you stitch together a picture in Panorama or 360 view on your phone. What takes us a few shots (think about swiveling your head around to see what’s going on), the dragonfly can do in real-time.

This is critical, if you are doing high-speed intercepts of insects.

It’s also critical if you’re trying to understand the dynamic world around you.

So, the more each of us can do to cultivate awareness outside of our own fields of vision, the more likely we are to be able to detect changes in the environment, which means we can anticipate changes and make predictions about them.

It’s the difference between driving through a blind intersection and one where you can see an out of control car careening towards you from the other side.

In one, you have to get lucky. In the other, you can take predictive, defensive measures.

The More Eyes, the More Awareness

This type of awareness can go beyond an individual, of course, and extend to an organization.

Yesterday, we touched on “market awareness” for the individual, so I suppose the theme is on my mind, but the part I’m really intrigued by is how to develop (and incentivize) organizational awareness.

Every organization, whether centralized or decentralized, has “nodes” that each serve as a type of eye for the larger group.

Just like a dragonfly, the marketer in Seattle and the tech in Hyderabad, both have slightly different angles on the market, the product, and the customer.

The challenge, now as always, is how to bring all of those together and stitch them into a more comprehensive picture of situational awareness.

My bias says that, at scale, individuals taking actions in response to their perception of the market and having those actions recorded immutably “on chain” are going to be wonderful sources of ever larger fields of situational awareness.

It sounds pie in the sky and fanciful…even to me.

But conceptually, I believe that people who are incentivized with accountability, are going to be better predictors than those who are not.

Token holders are incentivized. Their actions are recorded for all to see. So, over time, those types of organizations should develop better situational awareness.

When they do, they also make better predictions about the future, and thus have a better chance of survival.