Healthy friction: every board-paper forecast should state a confidence level and be checked against what happened

Geoffrey Hinton predicted the end of radiologists. There are now more radiologists than when he said it.

Geoff Mulgan uses that example in an essay on how to argue well, alongside Paul Ehrlich's famines that never came and Peter Drucker's prediction that the university campus would be gone by the 2020s. His diagnosis is what the novelist Doris Lessing called "clever stupidity": overconfident extrapolation dressed up as logic. The premises are sound, the reasoning is tidy, and the conclusion is wrong, because human affairs do not follow a line of logic in the head.

Of Mulgan's seven steps to a good argument, the one I would put in front of every leadership team is the fourth: calibrate your confidence. Hold each belief with the confidence the evidence warrants, and no more. He notes that experts are often the most prone to overconfidence, particularly when making predictions, and that many thrive in their careers more because of their ability to project confidence than because of their competence.

That matters more as AI forecasts multiply. Boards are being handed confident numbers on jobs displaced, productivity gained and markets won. Very few of those numbers arrive with a track record attached, and the people presenting them are rarely asked how their earlier forecasts fared.

Mulgan points to one habit worth copying. The Economist recently analysed 1,400 of its own falsifiable predictions, asking whether it is always wrong. The results were not bad, but the exercise itself improves understanding of how the world works. How many organisations have gone back and scored their own strategy papers?

A simple discipline would help: every forecast in a board paper states a confidence level, and every year someone checks it against what happened. The point applies as much to a plan for the business as to a forecast about the world, and a track record of calibrated calls is worth more than a confident tone.

Source: Geoff Mulgan, "Healthy friction", Geoff's Substack (11 October 2026), https://lnkd.in/g9gS89zi

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