Directionally, not precisely

My weather app is great. It tells me exactly what benevolences—and challenges— the sky will bestow today. Hour by hour.

My weather app is crap. When it warns me about heavy rain, the sun keeps smiling brightly. When it tells me to expect a warm and dry afternoon, the sky ends up laughing on my laundry.

It’s been a long rainy season, and my app is correct about that. Where it goes wrong is in attempting to be too precise. In truth, it knows much more about direction than about exact local timing. It’s only estimating, but when its estimates look like precise numbers, we end up fooled.

The weather app is not foolish. Weather is just complex. The model is trying to tame a living, ever-changing system. But the mistake is ours: we read probability as promise. We turn signals into schedules.

The sky has magnificent indifference to humans and their speculations and calculations. 

My deeper point today: many important things in life can be known directionally long before they can be known precisely. Weather. Markets. Cultural change. Strategy. Careers. Relationships. Health. Reputation. Technology adoption. 

You often cannot know the exact Tuesday on which the storm will arrive. But you can know the season is shifting.

My long experience of sitting in boardrooms tells me that strategy often suffers the same disease. Leaders want exact market-size forecasts, exact timelines for transformation, exact adoption rates, exact competitor moves. But strategy is not fortune-telling in a business suit. It is the art of reading direction, preparing options, and adjusting intelligently as reality reveals itself.

Life, too, rarely gives us exact timelines. We may sense that a relationship is deteriorating, a career path is narrowing, a habit is damaging us, a new capability must be built. We may not know the exact outcome or date. Waiting for certainty can become a polished form of avoidance.

When the world is unstable, stop demanding exact dates from moving weather. Read the direction. Prepare for the turn. Keep your footing when the sky changes its mind. When the system is unstable, the arrow matters more than the timetable.

A familiar aviation metaphor makes the point well. An aircraft may have a planned route, but the sky is not a railway track. Winds shift. Weather builds. Traffic control intervenes. The plane is nudged, corrected, adjusted. What matters is not perfect obedience to an imaginary line, but disciplined correction toward the intended destination.

The club of my favourite economists is a very small one. Two of them, John Kay and Mervyn King, make this point well in Radical Uncertainty. Real people, households, companies and governments don’t really optimize or maximize in the tidy way textbooks suggest. They cope. They make adjustments based on partial knowledge, past lessons and changing conditions. They try to occupy a better place than the one they are in now.

Let me end with a word for today’s young people, who are coming of age in a fog thicker than most recent generations had to face. Some are held back by the buffoonery and chicanery of their leaders. Others are being unsettled by the short-sighted response of corporations to AI: fewer doors opened, less patience offered, less willingness to invest in those who still have to grow.

But remember this: it is direction, not precision, that counts.

Your life may not unfold exactly as you once imagined, month by month, year by year. That is not failure. The real question is whether you are still moving the right way. Keep investing in direction: your skills, your judgement, your values, your character. Become sturdier, wiser, more useful. Be directionally sound, and the detailed route will keep revealing itself.

THE SIGNAL IN THE NOISE

Get the direction right. The exact coordinates can follow later.

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