At the center of a stage draped in hues of violet and blue, a twisted rind transformed into a metal chip behind an orange cut in two. The distinct and inspired logo for The MFG Meeting 2026 caught the eye of Sam Potolicchio, Ph.D., president of the Preparing Global Leaders Forum and a professor at Georgetown University, as he took the stage and recounted the parable of the orange.
Potolicchio described how two people, both wanting the same orange, split it in half, each getting half. Yet, had either of the people wanting the orange taken the time to understand the other's motivation, they would have discovered that each wanted a different part of the orange. The parable shows how understanding motivations can allow both people to walk away with 100% of their desired outcome, rather than just half.
A similar parable could be told through a bungled machine tool sale: Failing to understand a customer’s needs or motivations may result in a mismatch between what was quoted and what was required. Even when the customer and the sales engineer are completely aligned on a solution, the sale could still be lost due to other factors. In this regard, predicting the success of an individual sale is quite similar to projecting the outcome of political events, such as elections.
The most widely used election outlooks attempt to forecast the share of the vote each candidate will receive by sampling different demographic segments of the electorate and predicting who will turn out to the polls on election day. With the proliferation of prediction markets and the popularity of political psychologist Philip Tetlock, author of “Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction” and other works, probability-based measures of outcomes have become more common. Forecasters can draw on a long history of elections to assign a positive or negative impact to each candidate’s likelihood of winning based on events such as a good fundraising quarter, a slip-up on a hot mic, a well-received advertisement, or any other event leading up to Election Day. Despite these nuances, once Election Day passes, the outcome is all-or-nothing, and the veracity of a prediction is generally evaluated based solely on whether a candidate won or not.
Potolicchio argues that predictions of political events should be judged not by their outcome but by the process by which the forecast was made. If, over many elections, a particular campaign activity is shown to increase the probability of success, it was probably the correct decision, even if the candidate eventually loses.
Potolicchio illustrated this point with the now-infamous ending of Super Bowl XLIX between the New England Patriots and the Seattle Seahawks. On Seattle’s final play at the one-yard line, the team opted for a passing play despite having a Hall of Fame-contending running back on the field. The result was an interception cementing the New England Patriots’ win. While the outcome would indicate the wrong play was called, an examination of the probability of conversion from each option would favor passing. This seemingly counterintuitive thinking underscores what happens when trying to predict the outcome of a single event.
Probability gives insight into what will happen over a very large number of repeated trials. For one-off events such as an election, the result of a big game, or selling a machine, probabilities can help us estimate the likely outcome, but we still tend to judge both our predictions and process based on the binary outcomes: the election was won or lost; the ball was caught or dropped; the sale was made or lost.
This phenomenon is best summarized in the recently revived medical sitcom “Scrubs.” In a Season 6 episode, the character Dr. Cox laments, “Statistics mean nothing to the individual.” While something may have a 95% likelihood of happening across a large sample, a single observed event could fall on either side of that probability. Not much outside the world of the hypothetical comes with 95% certainty, and as the probabilities get closer to 50-50, it becomes easier to fall into the tendency to judge both predictions and processes based on an individual outcome.
The proclivity to judge our actions and predictions based on binary outcomes was not the only bias that Potolicchio mentioned in his presentation. Through quickly shown paintings and videos of people passing a ball, Potolicchio illustrated how focus on one detail can blind us to other, even more obvious ones – and in some instances, our minds can fill in details that weren’t there. These cognitive biases embedded in every person’s interpretation of sensory inputs underscore the importance of carefully evaluating incoming information. Understanding these biases is critical to our interpretation of new information and its impact on the outcome we are trying to predict.
When predicting the outcome of an individual event, it is easy to focus on the outcome to determine whether our process was a success or a failure. Learning from large sample sizes allows us to make predictions with greater accuracy, but this does not accurately predict outcomes in every individual instance. By focusing on the decision-making process, both political forecasters and manufacturing technology sales teams can hone their craft so that a missed prediction or lost sale is not the result of faulty analysis but an opportunity to gather more information and refine the process for the next sale.
As in our machine-focused corollary to the parable of the orange, a firm understanding of a customer’s needs will go a long way toward increasing the odds of a sale. Products offered by AMT – The Association For Manufacturing Technology can help businesses both understand customer needs and increase engagement prior to a sale. The IMTS Exhibitor Passport digital marketing tool enables conversations with customers to begin long before the doors to IMTS – The International Manufacturing Technology Show open in September 2026, and events such as the 2026 AMT Summer Economic Webinar offer opportunities to understand the economic conditions that are top of mind for potential customers. An incomplete understanding of these conditions or a limited ability to reach potential customers is akin to leaving some sales to chance.
