Paul Rogers dusts off his no-nonsense crystal ball, challenging the most common procurement predictions to reveal what he believes will actually happen next year…and why are we so obsessed with predictions, anyway?
My Mother used to swirl the tea leaves around the bottom of her teacup. She tried to look for patterns that might help her predict the future. However unlikely this method might appear, throughout history human beings have tried to divine the future.
Shamans and Oracles claimed to be able to foresee future events. Astrologers interpret the relationships of celestial bodies like the sun, moon and stars to predict what will happen tomorrow. However bizarre these methods are, at least they don’t involve sacrificing an animal to predict the future by examining its entrails!
The next couple of months will see a range of people try to predict the future. They will earnestly announce ‘The Top Trends for 2026!’ In fact, here are my top five predictions about what influencers will pontificate about (and my guess of what will actually happen):
Prediction 1: “2026 will be the year that procurement finally gets a seat at the top table!”
Reality: No, nothing will change
Prediction 2: “AI will break through and become widely adopted!”
Reality: No, AI will not ‘break through’ and the hype cycle will reach the ‘trough of disillusionment’
Prediction 3: “Category management will finally become the norm!”
Reality: Category Plans will feature more AI-generated content (but many will still remain unread)
Prediction 4: “Everyone will accept that panels are essential’”
Reality: Some panels will have more suppliers than actual engagements
Prediction 5: “Procurement will be reinvented as (insert label of your choice)”
Reality: Some stakeholders will still use the term ‘purchasing’
Why are we so obsessed with predicting the future?
For most of human history, getting the future wrong could kill you. If you could predict “animals drink here at dawn” or “that rustle means predator”, you were more likely to live, eat and reproduce.
So, the brain evolved as a prediction machine: it constantly guesses what will happen next and compares that to what actually happens.
Conversely, not knowing what’s coming makes most people feel uncomfortable. When we can predict something, we feel more in control, even if we are not.
Is this why people like to read predictions? Even a bad prediction can feel better than no prediction at all, because it gives you something to plan around.
And, of course, uncertainty is a driver of anxiety. Having any forecast or story about the future is calming and provides a ‘narrative’ to grasp onto.
Stromboli, a volcano in Italy, has been erupting continuously for 2000 years, but when another volcano erupts, journalists still ask vulcanologists, “when will it stop erupting?” Prediction isn’t just about information. It is about soothing the nervous system.
In work contexts we all need to be ‘singing off the same hymn sheet’. Imagine if key departments in the same organisation have different views about what might happen in the next 6, 12 or 18 months. It would be chaos, wouldn’t it? Even imperfect predictions act as a shared story that lets groups align and act consistently.
Seeing patterns where they don’t exist
Is this an image of a man’s face or just dots? We are natural pattern detectors, so we can be prone to ‘join the dots’ even when there is no underlying pattern. We see patterns in data and trust narratives like “this trend always continues”.
If you think about it, a false positive (“I thought there was a tiger, but there wasn’t”) is a better option than a false negative (“I thought it was nothing, but it was actually a tiger”).
Prediction is socially rewarded
Experts, commentators and analysts are rewarded for confident predictions, whereas admitting uncertainty can be interpreted as a lack of expertise, rather than refreshing honesty.
Albert Einstein is credited with saying, “The more I learn, the more I realise how much I don’t know”.
Contrast that with the Dunning-Kruger effect. The Dunning-Kruger effect is a cognitive bias where people with low capability in a topic overestimate their competence, while experts can underestimate theirs.
This leads to a lack of self-awareness in novices, who don’t know enough to know what they don’t know, causing them to appear overly confident.
The illusion of certainty
The uncomfortable truth is that it isn’t just influencers who make predictions. Most procurement teams produce impressive planning artefacts:
- Multi-year sourcing pipelines
- Demand forecasts for key categories
- Five- or 10-year capital and ICT roadmaps
- Category strategies illustrated with Gantt charts and heat maps
We participate in risk identification workshops as if the output gives us a degree of certainty. At best, they are educated guesses. It might be time to admit that the problem is not that our forecasts are bad. The problem is that we rely on them too much. We confuse forecasting with control.
Our forecasts may not eventuate, but this is not due to incompetence. They were just built on assumptions that aged faster than expected. The problem is when our confidence in the plan persists after those assumptions have been shown to be wrong.
We rarely say this out loud, because decision makers take comfort from charts, numbers and certainty, but procurement practitioners know that the neat curve on the slide doesn’t always resemble what actually happens.
Forecast vs. readiness
The goal should not be better forecasts, the goal should be better readiness.
Forecasting tries to answer the question: “What will happen?”
Readiness answers a different question: “What will we do when something happens that we didn’t expect?”
Here are some options for procurement practitioners seeking to become quick responders rather than soothsayers:
1. Generate scenarios rather than make single predictions: Instead of one option, develop three: optimistic, realistic, stressed. What would sourcing, contracts and supplier capacity look like in each case?
2. Make contracts more flexible: Build in volume bands, options and mechanisms to change scope without starting from scratch
3. Make programs modular: Break large programs into components that can be accelerated, paused or reconfigured as conditions change. This is just as relevant to ICT, maintenance services and professional services as it is to major works
4. Shorter planning cycles: Instead of treating the procurement plan as an annual tablet of stone, treat it as a rolling horizon. Re-forecast quarterly
5. Trigger-based reviews: Identify leading indicators (‘triggers’) that may cause a rethink. Examples of triggers include price volatility, significant FX changes, changes in demand or key supplier distress
Contract ‘stop/pivot’ points
Design contracts with natural review ‘gates’ where both parties can pause, re-scope or terminate with clear commercial consequences. This is healthier than pretending everything is linear from day one to the final milestone.
“It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future”
Whether that quote was first made by Yogi Berra or Niels Bohr, it highlights the difficulty of forecasting the future. We all know that unknowns and complexities make accurate prediction nearly impossible, even though we constantly make predictions in daily life and business.
No one expects the world to become more predictable, but we do have a choice about how we respond.
Here’s my resolution for 2026: “I will spend less time pretending I can predict the future, and more time getting ready for the future I can’t see.”
Paul Rogers is Practice Manager at Landell. The opinions expressed in this article are the author’s alone and are not necessarily the opinions of Landell.
