Posted on: February 17th, 2010 by Reuben

This is a bit of a secret, so don’t tell anyone. I’ve got to take part in a panel at the IoF in June. It’s about predicting the next ten years in fundraising.

The trouble is, not only am I rubbish at predicting the future, I don’t actually believe in it.

Broadly I’m a believer in the Black Swan thesis – we’re terrible at predicting the future, but very good at post-rationalising, or just conveniently forgetting about, our predictions afterwards.

I was very bemused by the sudden slew of financial experts who popped up after the Credit Crunch to tell us how to get out of it. None of whom had had the foresight to tell us how to avoid it – or even that it was weaving erratically down the road towards us at all. Some experts.

In the early 60’s, many people paid handsomely to predict trends in music thought the Beatles weren’t worth hiring. In the 90’s, plenty of people whose job it was to find successful writers turned down JK Rowling (now the world’s biggest selling author). No-one saw 9/11 coming – although afterwards (as soon as it was too late) we enforced a major crackdown on global terror.

Do you really think that anyone in 1970 really had the faintest idea what 1980 would look like?

So much for futurology.

So where does this leave me, in June? Believe it or not, I’m not that worried. Because my confident prediction is that, as ever, our discussion about the future will actually be a discussion about now.

Perhaps we’ll start with a discussion about cheques, which are due to be phased out in 2018. The IoF thinks this will be a major problem for charities. (Given that quite a few charities haven’t quite grasped the significance of direct debit yet, I guess this could be true.)

But it won’t really be a discussion about cheques dying out. It’ll be about people who pay for things by cheque dying out, and where that leaves the traditional model of charity giving. Because cheques are a symptom, not a cause. That’s a discussion about now, not 2018

Anyway, I suspect we’ll have bigger things to worry about after the Venusians make contact next year.