Your Forecast is Wrong (and That’s Okay)

Just because you made a good plan, doesn't mean that's what's gonna happen. – Taylor Swift

I was 25 years old the first time I met with a financial advisor. I was unmarried, living in a small midtown Toronto apartment and working in my first full time job out of university. 

I can't say I remember all of the details, but we did go through all of the standard questions:

  • Will I be getting married? Having kids? How many kids?
  • How do I see my career progressing?
  • When might I want to retire?
  • What kind of a lifestyle do I want to have in retirement?

On the basis of that interview, we developed a savings plan and I started executing on it.

The following is an abridged list of events that have happened since that initial plan was created a quarter century ago, only a couple of which were accounted for (vaguely) in my original plan:

  • I left my stable job to pursue a not-so-stable career in consulting
  • I moved from my first apartment to a slightly larger apartment
  • I got married
  • We moved into an even bigger apartment
  • We had a kid
  • We moved into a house
  • We had two more kids
  • I co-authored a book
  • My wife went back to school for her Masters
  • The 2008 financial crisis happened
  • The Canadian government made numerous substantial changes to personal and corporate tax rules and registered savings programs
  • We sold our house and built a new house
  • Numerous cars were bought, many of which died unexpectedly
  • COVID-19 happened

You get the idea. Many of these events (and numerous others not listed) required a re-evaluation of our goals, a in the plan to achieve those goals or both.

The key takeaway from all of this is obvious: That because the original plan bears no resemblance to what it is today, for an unknown and unknowable future is a complete waste of time. 

At this point, you may be feeling a bit bewildered and thinking that this conclusion is – to put it kindly – somewhat misinformed. 

I want you to recall that feeling of bewilderment whenever you hear or read people saying things (in a context) like “You shouldn't be because forecasts are always wrong” or “Forecasting is a waste of time because you can't predict the future anyhow”.

This viewpoint seems to hinge on the notion that a forecast is not needed if your minimum stock levels are properly calculated. To replenish a location, you just need to wait until the actual stock level is about to breach the minimum stock level and automatically trigger an order. No forecasting required!

Putting aside the fact that properly constructed and maintained forecasts drive far more than just stock to a location, a bit of trickery was employed to make the argument.

Did you catch it?

It's the “minimum stock levels are properly calculated” part.

In order for the minimum stock level for an item at a location at any point in time to be “properly calculated”, it would by necessity need to account for (at a minimum):

  • The expected selling rate
  • Expected trends
  • Selling pattern (upcoming peaks and troughs)
  • Planned promotional and event impacts
  • Planned price changes
  • Etc.

Do those elements look at all familiar to you? A forecast by any other name is still a forecast.

The simple fact is that customers don't like to wait. They're expecting product to be available to purchase at the moment they make the purchase decision. Unless someone has figured out how to circumvent the laws of time and space, the only way to achieve that is to anticipate customer demand before it happens.

It's true that any given prediction will be “wrong” to one degree or another as the passage of time unfolds and the correctness of your assumptions about the future are revealed. That's not just a characteristic of a business forecasting – it's a characteristic of life in general. Casting aspersions on forecasting because of that fact is tantamount to casting aspersions upon God Himself.

It's one thing to recognize that forecasts have error, it's quite another to argue that because forecasts have error, the forecasting process itself has no value.

Forecasting is not about trying to make every forecast exactly match every actual. Rather it's a voyage of discovery about your assumptions and continuously changing course as you learn.

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