Predicting the Future

In a controlled environment inside an organization, good information, especially about the plans of others, ensures good information about the future. The best way to predict the future is to create it. If you have a proven plan and access to the right ingredients, equipment, and skills, you can predict what your plan will create. For example, if you have a cake recipe, access to a kitchen, the necessary ingredients, and the time to make it, you can usually correctly predict that the future will have one more cake in it.

This is prediction is only possible because you control the process. You control the resources and the actions of those involved. This defines a controlled environment.

However, you cannot predict the actions of others and their use of their resources in the larger, competitive environment. In a marketplace, for example, customers are free to decide what they do. They control the key resource involved, their money. This means that while you may be able to predict that you can make a cake, you cannot predict that anyone in the marketplace will buy it. 

In a competitive environment, you do not have access to the information that other people are using to make their future decisions. The environment is too large and complex. You often do not even know who the relevant actors in that environment are, much less the information that they have access to. When a business opens its doors in the morning, it doesn't know who, if anyone, will walk through them. Even if we could read each other's minds, there are simply too many people and possibilities to manage the vast amount of information involved.