A field guide to pretending responsibly

The first time I built a "bulletproof" forecast, I was at my kitchen table in the middle of the pandemic. Two monitors glowed with toggles for every variable: revenue ramp, hiring plan, invoice-level billing models. I could zoom from the 10,000-foot view into a single customer's payment schedule, navigating the business like I was piloting through a digital telescope. When everything else felt chaotic, this felt different. I had data. I had formulas. Confidence intervals that looked scientific and safe.

Then the world ignored it entirely.

At that kitchen table, emails arrived with subject lines like "Effective immediately: all non-essential spend paused." Timelines stretched in ways no model could capture. The forecast's neat chain of dependencies, each cell feeding the next in perfect harmony, collapsed into suggestion rather than signal. Forecasts are polite fictions. Not malicious lies, but structured stories we agree to believe for a while. They break gently, almost apologetically, when reality barges in with complete indifference to what we thought might happen. Yet we keep building them because in the absence of certainty, a shared story remains one of the fastest ways to move forward.

A forecast is always a story about a future that won't happen. That is the point, not a flaw. The value of the exercise lies in alignment. You take a fog of uncertainty and give people something to point toward. Suddenly, decisions that felt impossible become possible: who to hire, where to invest, what to cut. Whether you land at 47 percent growth or 52 matters less than whether the process moved people out of paralysis and whether the decisions held up once the future arrived looking nothing like the plan.

Numbers perform their own kind of theater. Decimals suggest precision. Trendlines imply inevitability. Charts pretend the world will stay still long enough to measure. Everyone knows the floor is uneven, yet they step as if solid ground stretches ahead.

Behind the curtain are gut calls dressed as analysis, narrative hunches wearing the mask of regression curves, politics disguised as market research. I once built a table with three decimal places on churn probabilities, as if adding digits made the guess less of a guess. 14.327%, based on history and two gut-check questions to a single sales manager. More often than not, the shape of the curve reveals what someone hopes is true rather than what’s likely. Still, the performance works. Fictional or not, the numbers open budgets, authorize hires, and shut down projects. The trick is remembering that you're agreeing on a version of the future that will not survive contact with the present.

I learned that the hard way. In a quarterly review, I sat on a forecast I already knew was wrong. A customer worth ten percent of our revenue had quietly paused spending the week before. The model on the screen still showed them at full run rate. The discussion moved from headcount to marketing spend to product priorities, all anchored to fiction.

"So we can afford three more heads?" someone asked.
"The model says yes," came the answer.

I kept thinking about when to speak up, watching each decision latch onto numbers I couldn't defend. By the time I did, half the room had already left to start work based on the original plan. Undoing it took weeks and burned trust I didn’t need to lose. The finance team rebuilt two models in two weeks just to unwind the damage.

I don't let that happen anymore. If the numbers change, the conversation changes too, even if awkward, even if it slows the meeting down.

The greater danger is convincing yourself. You start with caveats: "These are estimates." "Assumptions may change." "Market conditions could shift." Over time, repetition turns fictions into accepted truths. "The model says" begins to outrank "the customer told us."

Hiring accelerates on imaginary revenue. Roadmaps expand toward impossible futures. Marketing bets stack up like chips in a game no one can win. Admitting the forecast is wrong means questioning every decision it supported, so the questions never arrive. Capable teams walk straight off cliffs while still consulting the map. The best ones put the spreadsheet down often enough to check the ground beneath them.

Used responsibly, a forecast should orient you without binding you. Ranges beat single points: forty to fifty-five percent growth, with retention holding, hiring on track, and conversion rates steady. Each number tied to conditions that must hold for it to remain valid.

Scenarios matter: a stretch case, a base case, a worst case, and one labeled "Oh No." The point is to recognize the triggers for each before you're forced to decide under pressure. Forecasts must stay alive through interrogation. Something always changes mid-quarter: a lost customer, a missed hire, a market turn. Updating isn't maintenance. It is the job.

Even when nothing feels urgent, asking "What would have to be true for this not to work?" and treating the answer as an action item often keeps you upright. Trust the forecast enough to move, but question it enough to steer.

Forecasts will always be lies, but they can be useful lies if you treat them as tools instead of truths. Their worth isn’t in mirroring reality — it’s in helping you recognize a wrong turn in time to correct course before the cost becomes irreversible.

You'll present numbers with more confidence than they deserve; and, make choices on elegant guesses at best. The real skill is holding that double vision: one eye on the map, the other on the horizon. When the gap between them starts to widen in ways that matter, you put the chart down and navigate by what you can actually see.

You might still hit the rocks, but you won't be able to say you didn't see them coming.

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