Prediction vs Preparation
You can't predict the future, but you can prepare for it
Today’s essay is about business, but begins with some background in improv comedy. Have patience, it all comes together in the end!
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I spent many years of my life performing, coaching and writing about improv comedy. I coached a Canadian high school team to the national championship five times. Team practices would start in September and initially run twice a week for ~2.5 hours at a time. As we got closer to competition practices would increase to up to four times per week. Sometimes the Saturday practices would be 5+ hours long. At the time friends and family would ask me, “why do you need to practice improv? Aren’t you making it up as you go along?”. When my friend and I first self-published out book on how to coach improvisation we called it “Why Practice?” (When it was picked up by a legitimate publisher, the only change they asked us to make was to the title. It was published as “The Ultimate Improv Book”. It was the right choice. In the early days of Amazon the book became the #1 selling improv book, largely, I think, due to Amazon’s weak search capabilities and the “direct-match” nature of the title).
So, what’s the answer? Why practice?
My answer at the time referred to basketball. Basketball teams need to improvise through the game. They don’t know what their opponents are going to do. But that does not take away from the need to practice. Basketball teams practice both fundamental skills, plays for how the team will work together, and plans for how to react to what their opponents MIGHT do.
Improv is no different.
Early in the year we spend most of our practice time on core skills. The team gets better and better at thinking on their feet, learning the structure of humor, stagecraft, “being obvious”, accepting offers, raising the stakes — all the stuff you will learn in any improv class or manual you look at today. Later in the year we spend time on content knowledge (my team would learn all the bible stories, all the Greek myths, all the major Shakespearian tropes, most major historical events, superhero origin stories, etc), and practice applying that content with random “suggestions” to create something new. Around this time we would also explore different theatrical and cinematic styles and see if any aligned with the team’s strengths. We would also spend a lot of time getting good at improvised rhyming and singing.
As we got closer to competition we would start working on “plays” — in the basketball sense, not the theatrical version. We called them “structures”. We would create rough outlines for how a scene might run, and then play it again and again with different audience suggestions. We would refine and polish it so that every second of the scene would explore the audience suggestion in a new creative way, but usually in a way that had been pre-planned.
For example, we might ask for an object and the scene might run like this (where anything in square brackets is a variable that is directly influenced by the suggestion):
[Characters related to the object] is interacting with the [Object related to the object] in a [Location related to the object]
[Second character related to the object in a different way] enters the scene and interacts with the first character
[There is a problem related to the original object]
[Narrator cuts in and sings a song about the object and the problem. All rhymes end in a word related to the object]
[Third character enters and raised the stakes]
[Something causes all the characters to move to a new location — also related to the object]
[Narrator sings some more]
[All is lost — related to an extreme version of the object]
[Original character solves to problem with the related object from the beginning of the scene]
[Narrator sings some more to wrap up the story. Every one joins in for the final chorus]
In this version the story-structure is the same every time, but the details are very very different. Hopefully the team is strong enough, that when the object presents a “structure-changing” opportunity, the team is able to do that as well (i.e., “The object is a Shakespearian folio — let’s do the entire scene in iambic pentameter, and Shakespeare can be the main character thrust into a world with his own creations!”).
What’s all this have to do with business?
Rohit Krishnan of Strange Loop Cannon wrote an essay last month (September 4th) called “The Case Against Prediction”. It is worth reading the entire thing, but here are some highlights to get the general idea:
…it’s almost trivially true that predicting things correctly is better than not predicting things correctly. Whether in life or business or love or markets or governmental policies or war, it’s better to predict things better than not. This is true, and it makes sense… One problem with this is of course that the world is terribly complicated. Each of our actions spawn further decision points, and further actions to be taken down the road. The complexity grows very quickly, even if the decision you make is just a simple binary choice... Even if you know exactly how things will branch and exactly how you should react in such a circumstance, the sheer number of options will get away from you very very quickly.
So what is the solution?
Rather than force ourselves to come up with more and more ways to predict the future, which is inherently unknowable, we start learning about what’s going on and teach ourselves to move fast…. [earlier in the essay] The very act of pivoting a startup or constantly iterating a product after you build it though is a way of reducing the amount of prediction that’s needed, and instead choosing to react fast instead to new information that arrives… There is the belief that the reaction time itself could be enhanced through better prediction. Which also seems trivially true, though once again the cost of doing that enhanced prediction isn’t taken into account. In most real life settings, the question is one of what to do with the resources we have.
He argues that while prediction is “good”, there is an opportunity cost of focusing on prediction vs capabilities — and time spent developing capabilities and the ability to move fast given new information is far far more valuable than the slightly better ability to predict.
My first attempt at a business book was titled “Good Enough”. Rohit might be arguing that one wants to be “good enough” at prediction, and then stop trying to be better than that. Instead try and get better at execution. To go back to my original description of improv, focus more on the skills and less on trying to guess what the audience suggestion is going to be.
For this week’s premium post on Thursday I plan on writing more about the risks and downsides of using ideas like improvisation as a metaphor/skill building for business. Until then…
Keep it simple,
Edward