Forever Skills

2Insight

The ability to identify opportunities and make intelligent judgements has been, and always will be, critical.

To thrive in the future, possessing information alone will not be enough. In fact, access to information does not necessarily lead to success, nor to accuracy in predicting the future. Rather, success lies in the ability to transform information into insight through creativity and judgement. In other words, thinking is still going to be an important function, no matter how much data we gather.

Consider the majority of forecasts that pollsters were making just prior to the 2016 US presidential election. You may recall that most predicted Donald Trump was not only unlikely to win, he was even described as a ‘sideshow distraction’ that wouldn’t come close. Even on election day, some pundits gave him just a 15 per cent chance of winning. Obviously, they were quite wrong, despite having access to some of the most advanced information-gathering technology in history.

Exactly the same thing happened in the UK’s Brexit vote. Despite copious quantities of computer-gathered data, forecasters failed to predict the eventual outcome.

People were shocked. How could these major events be so wrongly forecast, given the times in which we live?

THE LURE OF DATA

It seems that even in an era where we create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every day, where computers can skim data sets and judge the mood of a workplace or even a country, human behaviour remains a little unpredictable ...