Predictably, unpredictable.

First there was the stressed-out policing of the property, tying down anything that an 80 mile-per-hour gust could turn ballistic. Then, there was the interior plotting of trajectories involving the intersection of tree limbs, windows, and a household full of potential razor-sharp shards. Finally, there were all those randomly scary “what if’s,” that nailed down point that this was nothing even remotely within our control.

After a weekend spent feeling like a bug at the dead center of a hurricane-sized flyswatter, The Reductionist can now report that a morning date with the hangman has nothing on an impending weather catastrophe when it comes to concentrating the mind. Gives you a real appreciation for what the original people in this part of the country had to live with and through.

As it happened, and not particularly surprising to anyone, not even the local news brigades who’d donned their very best somber faces and hoped for a thrilling 24-hours of worse and worser, the damned thing fizzled. Relief ensued; our household power never even blinked.

Except for the mental lightbulb that kept flickering, on and off, like our internet connection when the winds get dicey. Illuminated in the momentary brightness: the question of why we so blithely accept the unpredictability of prediction in our personal lives—"Henri failed to flatten New England, ho hum”—and yet so slavishly embrace the “certainty” of data in the business world. Especially, of late, in advertising.

Here’s a fun fact: statistically speaking, 5-day weather forecasts are 95% accurate, with the 7-day dropping to a still-impressive 80%—a hit rate that would prompt an entire consultancy’s full of digital geniuses to dislocate shoulders, patting themselves on the back. But the real reason a field as fractal and fuzzy as weather forecasting is able to exceed the wildest predictive dreams of CMOs isn’t really about technology and numerical models. Instead, it’s the way meteorologists understand that data is all about relative probabilities and informed guesses, not pretense and snake-oil guarantees.

In the weather world, both the on-air number crunchers and the audience knows that a 20% chance of wet means an 80% chance of dry. In advertising, all too often, we make that 20% sound like it’s 100% certain that storm-tossed seas will part. Worse yet, we do so at the cost of giving free rein to the kind of creativity that’s propelled by human-originated, not machine-derived, insights and intuitive leaps.

One of my favorite stories from the dusty annals of advertising was gifted to me by the late Ron Berman, undoubtedly one of the menchiest menches in advertising history. As he told it, FCB San Francisco had come up with a Levi’s spot concept that drafted on a scene from the famous James Dean movie, “Giant”—a young woman in a buckboard stands, stretches to show the comfort and give of the jeans, and yells at a picturesque farmhouse in the distance, “Travis, you’re years too late.”

Per standard procedure, Levi’s throws the thing into test and, what do you know, it comes back with the some of the lowest comp scores in category history. But instead of slamming the bulkhead door on it, Levi’s did something that seems almost impossible in our data-dictated era: they trusted their agency’s gut more than the research digits; approving what became the single most successful promotion in then-company history.  All because people, anti-predictably driven by curiosity, showed up throngs to find out what the hell it was about.

The light bulb flickers on once again:  by rejecting the forecast and embracing the fizzle, they allowed the fizzle to become its own lovely, beautiful, extraordinary, storm.  Now that, friend, would be something to behold.