Prognostication Is a Mug's Game: Looking at the Firm of the Future

The British have a marvelous expression for foolish activities. They call them “a mug’s game.” Well, prognostication is a mug’s game. The estimable Louis Menand, a professor at Columbia University and a New Yorker magazine writer, tracked a bunch of predictions made on TV talk shows and found that some 90% of them turned out to be wrong. Typical.

Why? And how can we do any planning if we can’t make reasonable assumptions about the future?

The reason that predictions are so hard to get right is that in today’s dynamic world, any course of action will likely be affected by unforeseeable random events that alter that course. Who could have predicted LinkdIn, or Facebook, or Twitter—much less the impact they would have on society and business? Remember when blogs were considered to be fads that would ultimately die or fade away? Now they are ubiquitous and an integral part of the business process.

What, then, are reasonable assumptions about the future of the legal and accounting professions in this dynamic society? Here, we can surmise—if not predict—a future by extrapolating two things from the past:

• Not as an extension of the past, but a clear view of the dynamics of the process of change itself—its causes and our responses to causes.

   

• By looking at trends, not just in the professions but rather in the needs of the clients, in the economy, in new law, all of which are evolving rapidly—faster, in fact, than most law and accounting firms are changing. Trends in clients’ industries portend changes in the professional firms that serve those clients.

Why should tracking client and economic trends work? Because virtually all the changes in professional firm structure and management, and therefore marketing, have come about in response to the needs of effective competition and the changing demands of clients.