Lessons from a super forecaster

In 2010, I made a group of fanatical colleagues at Syngenta with strong opinions about soccer laugh.

I had confidently stated that soccer was coming home to my native Belgium.

For a decade, they jokingly reminded me about a prediction I had made, ten years earlier, then I finally managed to prove them this forecast had a 100% accuracy and they went silent.

The Red Devils had just missed a few qualifications for the FIFA World Cup and European UEFA championships, and Belgian teams consistently failed to qualify for other tournaments, like the Champions League loosing miserably from unknown soccer nations in Eastern Europe.

Nevertheless, the Belgian Red Devils made my prediction come through, going straight to the first position on the FIFA world ranking.

The main event explaining my prediction was a rather surprising causal: I had learnt that unlike the super talents from French and Dutch soccer academies, Belgium selected kids that were not only gifted with soccer, but were also performing well at school, raising an exceptional generation of fast thinkers with agile feet like Lukaku (Chelsea), Eden Hazard and Philippe Courtois (Real Madrid) or Kevin Debruyne (Manchester City).

This golden generation of Belgian soccer never won a World Cup but slowly emerged from nothing to suddenly validate made my prediction!

How good is your forecasting skill?

Do you often predict the future? Do others stare in disbelief when you share your ideas about the future and they suddenly materialize?

Whether my more humble forecast, or the ones made by Warren Buffet, 3 principles make someone a super forecaster:

• Principle 1: Focus on the Longer term emerging patterns
• Principle 2: Identify the hidden causals that really matter
• Principle 3: Be prepared to be proven wrong, learn from mistakes and move on

Based on these 3 principles, what are your predictions for your future?

Remember, as long as you don't obsess with short-term guesswork, identify meaningful trends, work hard to collect and assess critical data, actively monitor the activity, and focus your understanding on the likely mistakes you made in your predictions, the better the decisions you will make about your future.

Forecasting is like chess: if it helps you win against your competition and achieve your goals, the effort was beneficial no matter how wrong your forecast was!