I tried to see what was coming 1,400 times. I was wrong about roughly 80% of it. That experience eventually became my latest book, Stop Predicting: 13 lessons from 1,400 attempts to see what was coming. Its central argument is simple: the objective is not to become better at predicting the future. It is to become better at operating when your predictions are wrong.
How japan’s oldest companies navigate uncertainty
A recent Harvard Business Review article on some of Japan’s oldest companies provides a fascinating piece of evidence for that argument. Researchers examined Japanese family businesses between 1994 and 2024 and found that they matched or exceeded comparable businesses in the United States, Germany, and Canada while taking considerably less risk. Their advantage was not superior forecasting. It was the architecture they had built for dealing with uncertainty.
Longevity is not a forecasting skill
One of the companies featured is Toraya, a Japanese confectionery business dating back centuries. Its main Tokyo factory was destroyed in an air raid in 1945. Japan was still at war. Sugar subsequently became scarce. The future could hardly have been less predictable. Toraya rebuilt and kept making sweets.
The important part is not the resilience story. It is the strategic logic underneath it. The company knew what it was there to do even when it had no idea what was going to happen next. That is a very different approach to strategy. Most organisations try to reduce uncertainty by producing increasingly sophisticated forecasts, market reports, trend analyses, scenarios, and now AI-generated predictions. There is nothing wrong with any of those tools. The mistake is believing they remove uncertainty. They don’t.
Prediction creates confidence. Fitness creates options.
That was one of the uncomfortable lessons from “Stop Predicting “. Individual signals are unreliable. Technologies move at different speeds. Regulation intervenes. Consumers behave strangely. Capital disappears. Wars happen. Scientific breakthroughs arrive early, late, or not at all. Trying to identify the future is a losing game. The more useful question is: What kind of organisation performs well across several possible futures? Japan’s long-lived businesses appear to have spent centuries answering exactly that question. The research points to characteristics including:
- a clear philosophy,
- very long time horizons,
- values translated into operations,
- disciplined evolution,
- prudent financing,
- and careful succession.
None of these tells you what happens next. All of them make you harder to kill when something unexpected happens.
Keep the core. Change everything else.
There is an apparent contradiction in companies that survive for hundreds of years. They are conservative and radical at the same time. They are conservative about purpose, identity, and values. They can be remarkably flexible about how those things are expressed. That is a lesson many companies get backwards. They become emotionally attached to products, processes, organisational structures, technologies, and business models while allowing their underlying purpose to become vague. The result is strategic rigidity disguised as consistency.
Strategic Box
This is exactly the logic behind the strategic box I use with leadership teams. The box forces clarity around six things: vision, mission, passion, values, positioning, and resourcing. None of those predicts what happens next. They do something more useful. They create a strategic centre of gravity. They define what the organisation stands for, where it is going, how it intends to compete, and what it is prepared to commit. Once that is clear, almost everything else can move. Products can change. Technologies can change. Structures can change. Channels can change. Business models can change. The stronger the box, the more freedom you have outside it. That is what a future-fit organisation needs: a strong centre and flexible edges. Know what should not change. Then, become extremely comfortable changing almost everything else.
Tradition can be an innovation platform
Another interesting aspect of the Japanese approach is the relationship between tradition and innovation. We tend to frame them as opposites. Old versus new. Legacy versus disruption. Stability versus experimentation. The strongest organisations use accumulated knowledge as an innovation advantage. Their history gives them judgment, relationships, pattern recognition, reputation, and institutional memory. They do not throw those assets away every time a new technology appears. They recombine them. That connects directly with another lesson from Stop Predicting: innovation increasingly comes from mixing signals, technologies, and capabilities that previously appeared unrelated.¡ The future rarely arrives as one new thing. It is usually a strange combination of old and new.
Strategy needs a longer clock
Perhaps the biggest lesson is time horizon. A company thinking about the next quarter behaves differently from one thinking about the next generation. It makes different investments. It treats people differently. It carries different levels of debt. It responds differently to temporary shocks. And, crucially, it does not confuse urgency with importance. This does not mean becoming slow. Quite the opposite. You can make extremely fast tactical decisions when the organisation is clear about its long-term direction. Purpose creates the anchor. Experimentation creates the movement.
Stop trying to be right
The obsession with prediction encourages leaders to ask: What is going to happen? I think that is increasingly the wrong strategic question. AI will make forecasts cheaper, faster, and more convincing. Every board will soon have access to extraordinary quantities of predictive intelligence. That will not eliminate uncertainty. It may simply make us more confident about being wrong. The more useful questions are:
- What remains true if our assumptions are wrong?
- What can we change quickly?
- What capabilities work across multiple futures?
- What are we unwilling to compromise?
- Where are we creating optionality?
- And could this organisation survive a shock none of us currently have on our radar?
Japan’s oldest companies suggest that longevity does not come from seeing further into the future It comes from building an organisation that does not need the future to cooperate. That is real future fitness.
