TEDxBROADWAY - Kara Larson

So, we're here today to spend a bunch of time thinking about the best that Broadway could be 20 years from now. To do that, we need to cast our minds into the future. We need to start imagining what can be. And inevitably, when we do that, we start predicting the future. We don't think about it very often, but almost everything we do requires making predictions about the future. If you put on a coat before you left the house today, it was in part based on a prediction about the future. Proposing to our sweethearts, investing in our retirement funds, picking up the phone and making a restaurant reservation, they all depend on predictions about the future. We do it all the time, but we stink at it. The divorce rate is a great illustration of that. That inevitable vacation where it rains all the time. New Coke. Anyone can whistle. Remember that one? We have abundant evidence that we're terrible at predicting the future. So, I wanted to think for a few minutes about why that is. What is it that we're doing? When we try to predict the future, we're doing one of two things. We're either predicting future events or we're predicting how we'll feel about those events when they happen. And of the two, the second is actually the more difficult. We misunderstand ourselves in some really interesting ways. And I'm by the way not an expert at this. I spent last weekend reading a lot of academic research in journals and articles and things and they see things like we have incorrect intuitive theories about the determinants of happiness. Anybody? Simple. We don't know what we want. Surveys of single women always come back saying that most single women think they'll be happier married. But surveys of married women asking them how they feel now over and over again they're not as happy as the single women say they are. Different conditions influence our predictions and our actual lived experience. A great example of this is that family vacation. When you're planning on taking the kids to a Disney park, what's in your mind is a picture of happy children going on rides in sunshine. When you get there, the conditions that you're experiencing expand to include crowds and heat and cranky children. Impact bias is overestimating how our future emotions will impact us or how future things will impact us. So, we assume that a happy thing that happens in the future will make us happier longer than it actually does. On the flip side, should disaster strike, we assume that we'll be devastated forever. And it's not necessarily true. I think I'm great living proof of this. When my first love dumped me, I thought I would never recover. I have in fact gotten over it. Thank you. Focalism is when we focus on one particular set of circumstances and miss a whole lot of other ones that also influence us. If you ask Midwesterners how happy Californians are, they assume that Californians are happier than Midwesterners because the climate is so great. What they overlook is all those other little influences. As it happens, Midwesterners are at least as happy as Californians, in part due to the lack of smog, the lack of earthquake danger, the comparative lack of traffic, the lack of vegan restaurants. So, if we're terrible at making predictions about how we'll feel about future events, we might be better at predicting those events, right? No. Especially in science and business, we try to ground our decision-making in facts, in hard data. So, we start building mathematical models. We make very complex forecasts. Everything from home prices to oil prices to tax revenues, unemployment, the 330 race at Santa Anita. You'd be amazed how much mathematical modeling actually goes into predicting horse races. But every mathematical model leaves out some variables. Sometimes because the variables are too complex to put into the model and sometimes because we just don't know what those variables are. We don't even know that they exist. Our own experience gets in the way of our ability to predict the future. On July 4th, 1776, King George thought nothing important happened. Do we think he missed something? We suffer from other blind spots in situational bias. We're overly influenced by our own current conditions. Every one of the next few people up here thought that the conditions that prevailed when they were speaking would continue to prevail in the future. It didn't seem unreasonable at the time. Urban pollution was getting worse and worse. I happened to walk past a pickup truck from the 1970s that was idling outside my block a few days ago and walking by it and smelling what was coming out of it. I'm thinking in the 1970s the use of gas masks by now would have been urgently important. In 1932, Albert Einstein knew for a fact that the nuclear chain reaction couldn't be controlled. And if the nuclear chain reaction can't be controlled, nuclear energy will never be a practical possibility. This guy was about to become the supreme commander of the Allied forces in World War I, a few years after he made this statement. But at the time, it was perfectly reasonable. In 1911, the first transcontinental US airplane trip took 49 days, and that allows for a number of crashes along the way. And Margaret Thatcher gave a very famous television interview in which she confidently stated that not during her lifetime would a woman be elected prime minister of Great Britain. She was elected in 1979. She's still alive. So we also have difficulty discerning probability. We don't understand it very well. And that makes it difficult for us to tell the difference between a longshot prediction and pure chance. The oracle at Delphi prophesied for over a thousand years in part taking advantage of this very human weakness. We also assume that change is constant. In fact, it comes in sudden jolts. Telephone technology remained essentially unchanged from 1876 until signals started going digital in the 1970s. That's a hundred years. In the time since then, your phones might as well be Star Trek communicators. Alexander Graham Bell wouldn't recognize the instrument you're holding, wouldn't understand the technology that's powering it, and probably wouldn't recognize an awful lot of the functions that you use it for. Then there's an interesting idea called the adjacent possible. It's nearly impossible for any of us to fully imagine a world completely different from our own. So when we set out to predict the future, we actually base it on a step away from where we are now. We're trapped in our own history. So what does all this have to do with thinking about Broadway 20 years from now? Broadway now is a physical place. It's an industry. It's a dream factory. It's a cultural influence. But I've just spent 10 minutes talking about how bad we are at predicting the future. So, I think it's safe to say that 20 years from now, Broadway will be a street in New York. That feels safe. Let's go a little further out on that limb and 20 years from now, it's very likely that Broadway will be a place that people go to see theater. Beyond that, I'm not willing to go. But I'm going to suggest that there are two alternate approaches that may today be more useful than trying to predict the future. One of them is based on this piece of advice from a Danish physicist. Don't predict, adapt. The errors that we've seen earlier are all based on our own inability to get past our expectations and our experiences. So Dr. Bach's advice is don't try, adapt, welcome change as it comes. Build flexibility into your thinking and be ready to act creatively to change as it arrives. And I thought that might be a little bit passive for all of you. So the other approach is to make change. Remember change isn't a smooth set of circumstances, one fading into the other. It arrives in fits and starts. It's a jolt of sudden newness. It's sometimes a flash of genius. You all specialize in that. So I'm going to suggest that the best way and probably the most satisfying way for you to predict the future is actually to create it. Create the future and let other people adapt to you. Thank you.