When I started working as a coach, I had the chance to have a supervisor known world-wide for his intellectual and human qualities. His name was Carlo Moïso (1945-2008). Moïso developed some very powerful concepts, which I have proposed to describe in my monthly articles. Among them is the “5 U’s” concept, which has a major impact on our professional and personal lives.
Carlo Moïso’s fifth and last « U » invites us to consider the future as unpredictable by definition and warns us against wasting our energies in the vague hope of foreseeing it.
During the course of my professional life I have seen projects and businesses fail because, although they had been carefully prepared, they had not foreseen EVERYTHING, simply because foreseeing EVERYTHING is not within the realm of human possibilities.
We delude ourselves if we think that if we had a crystal ball to foresee the future, our life would be happier and more serene: the crystal ball myth is very appealing, but if we give it some thought, are we quite certain that foreseeing our future would be a real advantage?
I suggest that we turn the subject around and push the paradox to its limits: what if the future were predictable?
We could foresee our careers, the reactions of our colleagues and our boss, market trends, the future of our enterprise, our love life, our children, our health, our vacations, our death…
What would life be like within the determinism of a predefined future?
We would no doubt be much calmer…but, let’s be honest, perhaps too calm, even bored!
If we think about it, we must conclude that life is worth living precisely because of the future’s unpredictability. Thanks to this unpredictability, we wake up in the morning thinking that we have a goal and that we are going to do our best to have a favorable future.
That’s precisely why:
• We go to work to finish that project that might get us a promotion, even if completing it seems terribly complicated.
• We make a feedback to our colleague while hoping he will do a better job next time.
• One morning we decide to take our son/daughter to school because we think that spending a precious moment with mother/father will make him/her happy.
• Our heart skips a beat when we think about the person we love: will he/she continue to love us ?
• And so on.
Let’s face it: if we could predict the future, would we do all the things that require some effort?
Would we make an effort if we knew that our colleague is in any case hopeless, that our son/daughter will in any case have a happy life?
And would we get up in the morning if we knew beforehand the outcome of all our efforts?
Let’s dig more deeply and ask ourselves: what would be the meaning of LIVING in a preordained life?
Aldous Huxley’s book “Brave New World” in which men’s destiny is predetermined, as well as many other books and films along the same lines, send us the same message: since everything is predetermined, the fiction hero tries to escape the determinism and to break through the predictability of the future so as to return to a more uncertain, less predictable world, similar to the one we are living in.
Why?
Since the future is unpredictable, we face a world of possibilities and move towards a wealth of solutions. Some of them depend on ourselves, others on the world we live in. This abundance of options offers numerous choices:
• In the first place, the choice to act responsibly so as to attain our goal;
• Secondly, the choice of giving our action a specific direction so as obtain the desired results;
• Finally, the choice of either congratulating ourselves for having achieved the desired objectives or having learnt from our mistakes.
Unpredictability sometimes frightens and distresses us.
In this case, I invite you think about a predictable world, about the apathy that it would engender, leading us to appreciate a future that is unpredictable regardless of what we do.
The positive side of unpredictability is that it is a source of movement and hence of life.
It also enables us to learn from our mistakes as well as our constructive experiences. In short, it teaches us to live.
