Those experts who appear on the TV, radio and papers who advise governments and large corporates ... guess what their ability to forecast the future is no better than yours and mine.

Disappointed that no one is paying you for your opinions?

What if you discovered that the better known and more frequently quoted the expert, the less reliable their guesses about the future are likely to be?

Well wonder no more.

In his book, "Expert Political Judgment", Philip Tetlock describes how he recruited 284 people whose professions included “commenting or offering advice on political and economic trends.” He asked them to forecast the outcomes for various situations. By 2003, he had accumulated 82,361 forecasts.

The conclusions from the studies are that:

1. expert opinions are useless for forecasting related to complex and uncertain situations.
2. expertise does not help; University students do as well as the experts at such forecasting.
3. experts’ statements about confidence have virtually no value. Indeed, if you put a group of experts in a room and have them make forecasts, their confidence goes up rapidly, but this has no relationship to accuracy.

If we apply the concept of the Fox and Hedgehog to this then the fox - the thinker who knows lots little things, who draws from broad range of experiences, and is better able to improvise in response to changing events - is more successful in predicting the future than the hedgehog, who knows a lot about one specific area of expertise, focuses solely within that area, and imposes conventional solutions to what are essentially poor observations of a situation.

Within most small businesses I observe and know of there are a broad range of Fox like skills. The challenge is to get all these minds working together to focus on the challeges your business currently faces.

So be aware of experts offering advice or opinions use them as a lamp post, for illumination, not as the foundation for your any new direction you may take.

Note: The facilitation processes used in the directedfocus programs are designed to make use of the skills and knowledge within your business, they aren't about us playing the advisor hedgehog role.