28. Professional Clairvoyance

Of all the traits that define a professional, the only one that interests me is their ability to predict and shape the future.

In fact, I believe the entire effort to professionalize the countless disciplines surrounding us in all fields is precisely to have people who can predict and shape future scenarios.

These aspects encompass two major skills:

• Knowledge of the domain, the forces that compose it, and what’s needed to shape them.
• Commitment to achieving the desired future scenario at the agreed-upon time.

I consider any other quality secondary. I’m not interested in the level of solemnity with which one conducts themselves, nor do I adhere to the belief in references or the community that the professional may build around themselves.

I’m only interested in their ability to predict and shape the future.

In this regard, I believe that all specialization consists of equipping people with the necessary tools to predict with greater certainty an outcome, given an event x.

In the world where we operate, where there are abundant wicked and hard-to-define problems, the ability to predict the future becomes elusive, and the capacity of a professional to partition the problem, iterate, and restrict scopes to provide certainty about that future scenario they aim to achieve becomes paramount.

Therefore, a professional’s performance is futile if they do not clearly understand the future they must build. It is useless to have other skills commonly attributed to a professional if they do not have a clear objective and can outline a plan to achieve it.

All efforts to train, coach, and educate a professional aim to endow a human being with the ability to predict and shape the future. In this sense, we can say that schools and universities are workshops where these “time machines” are built, capable of understanding a current scenario, an objective, and the path that leads us all to those future scenarios we need.

But such training is not enough; it’s just the beginning. What ultimately refines this “time machine” is experience. More specifically, the mistakes made in the process of predicting and shaping future scenarios that were not desired.

Mistakes are the input that refines the professional we all need.

To some extent, a professional gains professionalism according to their ability to make, understand, and correct mistakes. But even in such cases, the professional is not exempt from making new mistakes. That’s where their commitment is tested: the force that corrects their own or environmental deviations in pursuit of achieving the desired future scenario.

To assume a commitment means doing so even when future conditions vary; otherwise, it wouldn’t be a commitment.

Being “a professional”, then, means understanding the future you want to build, the paths that lead there, and also the mechanisms that allow focusing forces and resources to reach efficiently. And when all that fails, the commitment one has to, after all, build the future.