There are a lot of skills you learn because you’re thrown into situations which require you to learn them…how to communicate effectively, work with people, manage priorities.  And many companies have classes to teach them to you.  But there is one skill I am proud to say I taught myself which has helped me like no other.  It’s boring. Some would say tedious. But it has served me well.

The outcome is to be predictable. The skill required to do that? Forecasting.

There is no situation which benefits from uncertainty…not the market, not a project, nothing.  The most coveted situation in business is predictability….knowing what your numbers are going to look like…or at least having a pretty good idea. And the skill I learned that helps you? Forecasting.

It’s not just forecasting into the future and making a guess and stopping there. It’s forecasting the future, monitoring your actuals against the forecast, figuring out what caused you to miss your forecast, and adjusting your forecasts along the way so you can get more accurate as time goes by.

Sounds obvious?  Here’s the thing…you are often praised if you do better than your budget or forecast. So that incentivizes people to keep their forecasts conservative.  When I worked at Citi, any variance, to the better or worse was frowned upon because you didn’t hit your number.  That taught me I couldn’t play games of having an easy target…so I had to learn how to forecast.

I remember asking my team once how we were going to end the year. No one wanted to give me a number. I asked …”Wait a minute. We have all our actuals through October and we can’t forecast the last two months of the year?’ Needless to say, they got the point…and to their credit, they got so good at it they were upset when they were off $2MM on a multi million dollar budget! (They got a little obsessed).

I’m not saying set targets which aren’t achievable….that helps no one. And there are often surprises you can’t always account for (ask me about the year I found out that a system was decommissioned and I got hit with charges in December).  I do think there is benefit in knowing where  you think you’re going to land the plane. It requires discipline and work, but there’s no feeling like the one when you actually land the plane where you said it was going to land.

So boring? Yes.  But predictability….doing what you say you’re going to do? Priceless.