Brexit, Ten Years On: Still No Shortage of Hedgehogs

Politics rarely offers consensus anymore. Every issue seems to produce two confident camps, each certain that the other is wrong. This week, watching the ten-year assessments of Brexit roll in, I was struck by how familiar that pattern felt.

Research from King's College London concludes that Brexit has made the UK economy smaller than it otherwise would have been, not a sudden collapse, but a gradual, cumulative drag on trade, investment and productivity.

Some analysis points out that the predicted recession never materialised and that per capita GDP growth since 2016 has outperformed that of Canada, Germany and Japan.

Both sides cite data. Both are confident. Both are probably right about something. Which brings me to Philip Tetlock.

In 2005, Tetlock published one of the most sobering studies in social science. He tracked 284 experts: economists, political scientists, and intelligence analysts. Over 20 years and 82,000 predictions. The findings were that experts were barely better than chance. And the most confident voices were often the least accurate.

Tetlock classified the thinking styles using Isaiah Berlin's prototypes of the fox and the hedgehog.

The hedgehog thinkers: experts with a big idea and a worldview applied to everything. Brexit gave us hedgehogs on both sides. Remain campaigners predicted a near-immediate recession if we left the EU. Vote Leave promised £350m a week for the NHS.

The better forecasters were the fox thinkers, who drew on diverse sources and were better able to improvise with changing circumstances. Less compelling on television, but considerably more accurate.

But here's what the pattern also suggests.

Under pressure, people don’t update their thinking to consider new information. They dig in and defend their existing position.

The research suggests that being responsible for high-stakes outcomes tends to produce suboptimal judgments rather than sharper ones. Under scrutiny, people don't reason more carefully. They defend more vigorously.

Those with rigid worldviews were especially prone to doubling down when wrong. Their belief systems made it hard to admit mistakes, update in light of new evidence, or speak in terms of probabilities rather than certainties.

It's a pattern that can show up in organisations too. The longer you've held a relationship, a role, or a market position, the more assumptions you've quietly accumulated about what's possible.

In marketing services, the team that's worked with a client the longest is in danger of becoming the last to understand what the client values now. The risk is that their familiarity hardens into assumption. A new partner walks in, presents something the incumbent dismissed years ago, and wins the brief. Not because they're smarter, but because they hadn't accumulated years of assumptions about what the client would and wouldn't accept.

Under pressure, the two types diverge. The fox treats new information as input and updates their position. The hedgehog treats it as a threat and doubles down. The stakes don't sharpen judgment; they reveal which mode you're already in.

The question isn't whether you have conviction. The question is, do you update your conviction when presented with new information?

Looking back at those ten-year assessments, there was no shortage of conviction on either side.

What's the narrative in your organisation that hasn't been properly tested recently?