Past and future
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The design of organisations and products
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A great divide, and one that, However obvious it is, we pay less Attention to then we should.
To be trite: what exists in the past is fixed, immutable, unchangeable, and conceptually known. It is bounded, choate, and predictable in the sense that it has happened.
By contrast, the future has none of these qualities we are in a complex system it is unbounded the game is infinite, and none of the facts with which we educate ourselves exist in it. All are from the past.
Certain parts of the future can be segmented and segregated and treated as if they were in the past. For example zero sum games for which the rules and participants are known. But these games are significantly in the minority. As James P Cars would say, they are theatrical rather than dramatic.
Probabilities and statistics work better, in general, on systems that either exist in the past or are finite, so effectively are projections of the past into the future. We can calculate the probabilities of coin-flips, dice rolls, chess matches and football games, as they are essentially solved historical contests projected into the future. It is much harder to calculate the probabilities and expected values of future outcomes in complex systems like the ones most of us typically inhabit.
This is a great mistake of data modernism: calculating probabilities about the future from a position where the conditions for probabilistic thinking do not apply.