Just Start!

When you can’t predict the future, it's the best way to proceed

By Leonard A. Schlesinger, Charles F. Kiefer, and Paul B. Brown

You’re smart. Creative. And terrific at solving challenges. So why does it seem that the number of things you can’t figure out is increasing?

The problem may not be you. It could be the way you were taught to think.

From kindergarten on, we’ve learned Prediction Reasoning—a way of thinking based on the assumption that the future will be pretty much like the past.

Demographics are one simple example of how Prediction Reasoning (from now on, let’s just call it Prediction) works. You can calculate with a high degree of confidence what the world population will be in 2050 because you already know a lot of things: how many people are alive today (about 6.8 billion); distribution by age; the number of people in their 20s and 30s, the age when most people decide to have children; and recent trends in population growth—it’s slowing as people decide to have fewer kids.

Studying all this data—and much, much more—you can, as the United Nations did recently, say with a reasonable amount of certainty that by the year 2050 there will be about 8.9 billion people on the planet. Armed with that data you can also make a number of fairly accurate estimates of such things as how many diapers will need to be produced, how many gallons of water those 8.9 billion people will drink each day, and how much the U.S. will need to pay out in Social Security benefits when we reach the midpoint of this century.

Because it works so well in these kinds of situations—and countless others you can think of—we (like you) became accustomed to using Prediction all the time.

And yet …

Not everything can be foreseen (and thus predicted). Want to know if the cute guy across the hall is going to ask you out? Sorry, Prediction can’t help. Is the world ready for your brand-new product or service? Prediction does you no good.

When the future is unknowable, the way we traditionally reason isn’t much help. We need a new approach for navigating in an uncertain world. Well, we found one. And we know it works because it’s based on how the people who best deal with uncertainty—successful entrepreneurs—think.

Those who write about entrepreneurs invariably focus on their behavior: what Howard Schultz or Michael Dell did while building their respective companies. If you take that approach, you probably would conclude that every entrepreneur is unique, so there’s little to be learned from studying them.

Enter our friend Saras Sarasvathy, author of Effectuation: Elements of Entrepreneurial Expertise. Saras made a fascinating discovery, one that ran counter to conventional wisdom. She studied serial entrepreneurs, but instead of looking at their behavior—which is indeed unique—she focused on how they think. There she found amazing similarities in how they reasoned, approached obstacles, and took advantage of opportunities.

We built off of this, finding that when entrepreneurs create something new, they almost always follow these steps:

1. They want to do what they set out to do. It doesn’t have to be passion at the outset. That will build over time. But an honest desire is important—something more emotional than, “It seems like a good idea.”

2. They quickly take a small step toward their goal, using any means available. You don’t want to overcommit or move so far you can’t recover.

3. After taking that small step, they stop to see what they have learned. Maybe they learn their initial goal is still a good one. Maybe the market tells them to go in another direction. The point is, they pause and reflect.

4. Once they understand what they’ve learned, they take another small step and go through the cycle again. In other words, the formula for success (if there is one) is figuring out what you truly want to do. And once you know: Act. Learn. Build. Repeat. This process continues until you are either happy with the result or decide you don’t want to (or can’t afford to) continue.