Prediction & Presence

There’s a lot of effort put into forecasting—from the stock market and customer behavior, to the weather and the amount of material a company should order for manufacturing wool socks if the winter will be an especially cold one. Accurate prediction can be a powerful tool for management. 

But in human relationships and leadership, prediction has a much more limited value since it can trap us in rigidity, calcifying our thinking, emotional responses, or behavior. It’s helpful for the parent as manager to know there’s a high likelihood of a hungry or tired child at a certain hour, but it doesn’t exactly instill a growth mindset in anyone when we are too attached to a prediction about them. One of my seminary professors once called this “the sin of familiarity.”

We fall into this trap because prediction is attractive, for it creates the illusion of control.

In his beautiful book A Primer for Forgetting,ª Lewis Hyde shares “a discipline of the present moment” from British psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion, namely divesting oneself of memory and desire in one’s encounters with another:

To make room for intuitive knowing, every analytic session “must have no history and no future.” The therapist who knows something from the past may as well forget it to make room for the unknown…“do not remember past sessions.“…for when such things occupy the mind, the “evolution of the session” won’t be seen at the only time it can be seen, in the present moment. Second, avoid all desire, especially “desire for results, ‘cure,’ or even understanding.”

My friend George, part of whose work is in the aforementioned forecasting for wool sock production, reframes and expands on this idea: “Interacting with others based on our expectations from past encounters can make us callous to the possibility that others (and even ourselves) can and do change. When we expect certain behavior, we’re likely to frame and respond to others’ behavior in the form of a self-fulfilling prophecy, and doing so, we may fail to recognize growth and change, which can prolong resentment and delay forgiveness.”

And so for an alliteratively plosive principle: Don’t let prudent predictions of the probable preclude the practice of presence to the possible.

ª https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374237219