This TED Talk features writer and entrepreneur Margaret Heffernan, recorded live at TED Summit 2019.

Recently, the leadership team of an American supermarket chain decided that their business needed to get a lot more efficient.

So they embraced their digital transformation with zeal.

Out went the team supervising meat, veg, bakery,

and in came an algorithmic task allocator.

Now instead of people working together, each employee went, clocked in,

got assigned a task, did it, came back for more. This was scientific management

on steroids, standardizing and allocating work. It was super efficient. Well, not quite. Because the

task allocator didn't know when a customer was going to drop a box of eggs.

Couldn't predict when some crazy kid was going to knock over a display

or when the local high school decided that everybody needed to bring in coconuts the next day.

Efficiency works really well when you can predict exactly what you're going to need.

But when the anomalous or unexpected comes along, kids, customers, coconuts, well then efficiency is no longer

your friend. This has become a really crucial issue, this ability to deal with the unexpected,

because the unexpected is becoming the norm.

It's why experts in forecasters are reluctant to predict anything more than 400 days out.

Why? Because over the last 20 or 30 years, much of the world has gone from being complicated to being complex,

which means that, yes, there are patterns, but they don't repeat themselves regularly.

It means that very small changes can make a disproportionate impact,

and it means that expertise won't always suffice because the system just keeps changing too fast.

So what that means is that there's a huge amount in the world that kind of defies forecasting now.

It's why the Bank of England will say, yes, there will be another crash, but we don't know why or when.

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