Hindsight

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JC: [At the end of a characteristically rambling rant] “... so, I ask you: why have we been so bad at stopping catastrophic risks from happening? Leeson, LTCM, Amaranth, Enron, Global Crossing, Kerviel, Madoff, Bear Stearns, Lehman, LIBOR, Theranos, London Whale, Mossack Fonseca, 1MDB, Wirecard ... ”

Middle manager: [interrupting]: Simply put, we were not proactively looking for it. We were not using data properly to evaluate risk. To add value as an in-house legal function we need to use innovative tools to crunch data, proactively spot emerging risks and escalate them to business.”

A cold night in Vienna, 1808

On a freezing night December 1808, about 1,500 people attended an akademie concert at the Theater an der Wien in suburban Vienna. The programme was to be four hours long, during which a young composer from out of town would be debuting a number of works.

The run-up to the concert did not bode well: many of the musicians in theatre’s house orchestra had “conflicting commitments” with a better-paying gig across town at the Burgtheater, and even the solo soprano dropped out at the last minute, to be replaced by an unknown teenager— “I have to hop” is no modern excuse — and the composer, an irascible fellow, kept changing the music right up to the last minute. So poor were his relations with his musicians that, on some accounts, they refused his baton, and another conductor was drafted in to lead the orchestra on the day of the concert.

The concert was a disaster. The under-rehearsed orchestra was rubbish — “lacking in all respects”, according to one reviewer — the poor young soprano suffered stage fright, the hall was freezing and the show badly overran. During one work, the orchestra fell apart completely and had to restart the piece altogether.

So why, two hundred years later, is there even a record of this concert — most of Supercheese’s concerts were like that, and there’s no record of any of them — and how has it found its way onto a Jolly Contrarian article about hindsight? You will not be surprised to hear there is a punchline.

Of the scathing reviews that followed, one at least — in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung — was prescient enough to say the following: “To judge all these pieces after only one hearing, especially considering [...] that so many were performed in a row, and most are so grand and long, is impossible.”

To the punchline then: the young foreign composer was, of course, Ludwig Van Beethoven, and in that one concert he premiered his Symphony No. 6 (“Pastoral”), his Piano Concerto No. 4, and the aforementioned Choral Fantasia, as well as playing a few choice cuts from his Mass in C Major. If that wasn’t enough — and surely the premiere of the Pastoral, by itself, would have been enough to make the record of humankind’s highest achievements — after the interval, the orchestra debuted the most revolutionary piece of music, bar none ever written: the Disco Theme to Saturday Night Fever, although then known only as Symphony No. 5 in C Minor.

Okay, so, hindsight?

If the JC could travel back in time for one night only, throughout all of human history, this is the night he’d choose. He’d take thermals and a cushion. Imagine being one of those lucky 1,500 who heard the fifth symphony for the first time in history. There are few profound watershed in the cultural history of our civilisation, but that is surely one. But it would be imbued with such significance only because of the two hundred years of subsequent history from which we now benefit. Those lucky 1,500 probably found it quite tiresome. They may well have — most probably did — come in later life to freight that experience with more meaning than they could apprehend at the time.

This is the human condition, summarised. Only once it has happened — past tense — and often, only months or years after that, can we possibly apprehend the significance of unexpected events.

This is where my friend the middle manager makes his category error. Data all come from the same place: the past. When we review risks, catastrophes and step changes; when we consider punctuations to the equilibrium, fair or foul our wisdom, our careful analyses, our sage opinions, our hot takes, our thought leadership — all of these are derived from, predicated on, and delimited by data which, at the time the event played out, we did not have.