Predicting the future with Yogi Berra and Barry Melancon

Yogi Berra had it right when he said, “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” And yet, hard as predictions are, sometimes you have to make them; in fact, you have to make them fairly frequently, whether you’re planning your own career or running an accounting firm.

To help you hone your prediction skills, I’m going to offer you a mini-master class in how to think about the future based on a presentation that Barry Melancon, the president and CEO of the American Institute of CPAs, gave to the Fall Meeting of the institute’s Governing Council. To be clear, Melancon wasn’t specifically teaching prediction — he was talking about how the profession will change between now and the end of the decade — but the ways in which he identified those changes and their ramifications offer some great lessons for thinking about the future.

“There’s no way to project 2030 with any certainty,” Melancon said. “It’s important to think in systemic ways about how things will change.” A number of his predictions neatly illustrate precisely those kind of systemic ways of thinking about change; here are four:

• Start with facts you know. “The reality is that by the time we get to 2030, we’re going to have leadership that comes from Generation Z,” Melancon noted. “We’re wringing our hands about keeping them in the profession, but in 10 years, they’ll be leading it.” Some future events, such as the aging and succession of generations, or Moore’s Law (thus far), or the election cycle, are simply inevitable, and you can make predictions that involve them.
• Don’t let your current preoccupations rule the future. Right now, firms are deeply concerned about finding and keeping top talent — and that may well still be a problem in 2030. But there’s a bigger issue to worry about over time: “While we’re focused on recruiting and retention, as we flow to 2030, the big challenge is how we think about skill-set gaps,” Melancon warned. “The skill challenge is what’s going to be important for our profession.”

  

  Courtesy: AICPA

• See the big picture. “Today, we’re talking about the impact of inflation,” Melancon said. “As we flow to 2030, inflation may moderate, but some of the uncertainty will remain.” The temporary form of that uncertainty (today, inflation) is less important than the larger reality of much more constant uncertainty, whatever its current form.
• Remember: Nothing is forever. The current pyramid structure of accounting firms has been in place since the 1930s and 1940s, Melancon said — but that’s going to change completely, whether to a diamond shape or something more along a manufacturing model. The lesson here is that past longevity is not the same thing as immortality.

Another prediction Melancon has made (this one on many, many occasions) is that the pace of change in the profession is faster today than it’s ever been, and it’s likely to continue to get faster. And while it’s great for accounting that he is able to see so far ahead to so many trends on the profession’s behalf, it’s also critical that accountants at all levels start learning how to make their own individual predictions, because those changes will happen at all levels of the profession, and impact all of us, every day from now to 2030 — and beyond.