In 1943, Thomas Watson Sr., the president of IBM, famously estimated that the global market for computers would likely top out at five machines. By 1977, Ken Olson, the founder of Digital Equipment Corporation, maintained that there was no reason for any individual to have a computer in their home. These were not the musings of amateurs; they were the calculated projections of the most sophisticated industrial minds of their respective eras. They were also wrong by a factor of several hundred million.

The failure of these predictions was not a failure of intelligence or a lack of data. It was a failure of the predictive instrument itself. When we treat a five-year plan as a fixed destination—a specific set of coordinates on a map—we are assuming a level of environmental stability that the modern economy simply does not provide. The variables that dictate a company’s revenue in sixty months, from interest rate fluctuations to the emergence of generative AI, are not just unknown; they are currently unknowable. We mistake precision for accuracy.