Posted by Adam Gordon on Aug 4, 2009 in 2025, all, economy & finance, failed predictions, lifestyles & values, social change, technology change
In all the predictions of the future that I have ever read or heard, and all the scenarios I have been exposed to, it’s almost unheard of to see one that says “the squeezed middle class keeps their eye on a good deal, as they always have.”
I’m thinking about this as I see the Guardian today featuring a story about how “Poundland” has doubled it’s profits. Poundland is a copy-cat of the venerable US institution, the “dollar store,” where everything cost the same price, in this case £1.
Pic: Andrew Fox, The Guardian, August 4, 2009
The merchandising of these stores is not unsubtle. There are definite too-good-to-be-true loss leaders, but these more than offset by the many items that cost pennies wholesale. Fair enough. And recently reported doubling of profits is because more people are buying at these stores (downshifting) due to recessionarly squeeze and/or because of the current “sense of thrift” in the zeitgeist which makes pennywatching more “the done thing.”
But neither merchandising, nor consumer psychology is our primary concern here. From a foresight point of view, the point is that forecasts of 2010 that were around around a decade or two ago didn’t quite get around to saying anything about Poundstretcher leading a healthy economic life. It’s as unsexy as anything, compared to “peak oil” or advancing “singularity,” or nano-babble, and so on into the glorious future – or its polar alternative: crash & burn, soup kitchens, urban warlords rampaging, and so on.
But here we are coming to the end of the decade and a basic retailing gimmick for the squeezed middle-class consumer is well trafficked and very much part of the future. Yes, it’s success correlates with tougher times, but economic cycles will be with us repeatedly through the rest of the century and beyond.
This doesn’t mean there won’t be breakthroughs in technology or in consumer behavior. In fact, looking at the picture, one surely would not have got a pound for any amount of plain bottled water in a retail environment 20 years ago. Things do change. They just change slowly, or unevenly, against the gritty reality of savvy agregate choices made by a wary (global and growing) middle class.
read morePosted by Adam Gordon on Jul 21, 2009 in 2025, all, failed predictions, forecast filtering, Future Savvy, history, Perils of Prediction, politics of the future, strategic foresight, trend tracking
The copy of USA Today, slipped under my Chicago hotel room door on Friday—failing which I would have missed the event entirely—marks the 40th anniversary of Apollo 11 putting man on the moon (July 20, 1969). It says: “40 years after Apollo 11: What’s our Next Step?” The strap goes on: “The moon again? Mars? An asteroid? Four decades after the moon landing, NASA seeks a new—and affordable—frontier in space.”
The failed “our-future-in-space prediction” cluster is useful because it is the poster child for bad predicting, nothing less than foresight idiocy in its purest form, worth mentioning only because it helps us to see smaller and more subtle future-thinking mistakes we make routinely.
This is what I said in Future Savvy (Chapter 5):
“The forecasts that surrounded the future of space travel and exploration are perhaps the most high-profile and comprehensively poor set of forecasts ever made, and therefore provide a good vantage point to consider what can go wrong in forecasting. From the 1950s, space was a huge topic of interest. All significant earthbound exploration challenges had been overcome, technology was moving rapidly, and what lay ahead, unconquered, was space. The need to explore it was deeply in the zeitgeist.
“At the same time, the Cold War created the specific situation where beating the Soviets in prestige projects was an important priority, important enough to divert massive resources to it. J.F. Kennedy’s rousing (future-influencing) 1961 prediction of putting a man on the moon by the end of the decade motivated and galvanized the United States, and the resulting Gemini and Apollo programs made this not only a human achievement but a successful prediction. As a result, analysts of all stripes were quick to project the trend and predict a moon base, lunar communities by 2000, followed soon by trips to Mars and beyond, and on to the limits of space. . . .
“The last man to set foot on the moon was in 1973. The Space Shuttle tried to maintain forward momentum under the guise of scientific research, not without disaster, and an almost inconsequential international space station has been built. To this day there are many who cry into their soup over the lack of space exploration and conquest. So what happened? The groundswell of prediction was wrong because it failed to see that putting a few U.S. men into orbit did not add enough value to enough peoples’ lives to justify the expense—particularly in the economically uncertain 1970s. In the end, the majority of consumers voted with their wallets to postpone, if not entirely eviscerate, human space exploration.”
One could go into great detail, but simply put, the intertwined elements resulting in this poor view of the future were:
1. Failure to recognize user utility and the choice consumers make in determining the future. That is, for most people the cost of any space venturing is not worth the benefit (i.e. what benefit?) The fact that we “can do it” is hardly relevant. The real futures question is always: do most people want it? In the 1960s space was “worth it” (particularly in that the goal was clear and bounded) because spending billions on a prestige project made sense at a time of (a) absolute US economic prosperity and (b) ideological dispute with the USSR.
2. Projecting trends without considering the strength of underlying drivers. Space exploration was, apparently, on-the-up in the 1950s and 60s. But trends are only as good as the drivers that support them. When the drivers go away (lack of public support due to cost/benefit issues) the trend stops. In fact, there is no real, dependable, trend to space exploration. There was a blip in the 1960s when conditions temporarily favored a national prestige extravaganza. There wasn’t a trend before, and there hasn’t been any since.
3. Forecasting mired in the conditions or spirit of the present, the zeitgeist. Space was important in the golden-era 50s and 60s; and particularly in that it was arena of competition with the Soviets. But it’s always a mistake to assume the framing conditions of the present will exist in the future, and in this case 40 years later, they most certainly don’t.
Don’t hold your breath
What of 40 years time? It is quite likely that “space flip” flights into orbit will be safe and cheap enough to commercialized in the next decade. Unmanned probes (again safe and relatively cheap) will continue, and popular access to their images and experiences will be greatly enhanced. But that’s all that will happen until such time as costs and other conditions of possibility change fundamentally, which implies a completely new form of space travel, of energy, of materials, and of human resilience and longevity. Not in this century.
Wired Science ran a July 20 article “40 Years After Apollo 11, NASA Maps Out the Future,” which puts the best possible spin on this unmanned-probe future. It is careful to end without crushing the feelings of space junkies, saying: “Any American landing on Mars through the Constellation program would come some time after 2030.” It won’t happen, and here’s another secret: if anyone is going to land anywhere it will be a Chinese person. China still has prestige projects ahead of it, and human space exploration could be one of them.
read morePosted by Adam Gordon on Jul 3, 2009 in all, failed predictions, forecast filtering, foresight tools & methods, Future Savvy, history, lifestyles & values, Perils of Prediction, politics of the future, social change, strategic foresight, technology change
Samuel, L., Future: A Recent History, University of Texas Press, 2009
I recently received a copy of Future: A Recent History to review. True confession: what hit me first on picking up the book was (a) “wow, the title Future is not already taken!? And (b) what a fabulous job the University of Texas Press has done producing this book. It is beautifully designed, with an understated Art Deco motif, and carefully laid out with enough text on the page, on delightfully solid paper stock.
It may seem odd to go on about text on the page, but it’s much easier to read like an adult, in paragraphs. So many books, particularly business books, these days appear produced at 14-point, double spacing, like pre-school readers. Makes you wonder…
Anyway, author Larry Samuel’s project is to investigate the history of views of the future from 1920 to the present. (The book has an acknowledged US-centric focus, partially defended by the notion that future-mindedness is “a principle strand in America’s DNA.”) He organizes the book chronologically into six periods between then and now, and shows, with interesting examples, how each period had its own views of the future, and how the views shifted from period to period.
In tracing the history of “tommorowism,” in this way, Future is on a similar track to the classic book in this field: I.F. Clarke’s The Pattern of Expectation 1644-2001 (Jonathan Cape, 1979). It ultimately makes similar points, although Samuel’s argument is obviously drawn from more recent examples. As Samuel puts it: “A look back on how people looked forward reveals that while it possesses certain common themes … the future is not a fixed idea but a highly variable on that reflects the values of those who are imagining it.”
Happily I can say this chimes exactly with the argument of Future Savvy, particularly Chapter 4 “Zeitgeist & Perception,” where I argued how heavily the nature of the present and its topical issues frames how the future is seen (what is forecast, what is aspired to or feared, what counts as a valid method for thinking ahead, and so on). Which means the framing conditions of the present should be carefully analyzed in assessing the validity of any future view.
Historiography
Historiography – investigating the meta-conditions surrounding what is recorded and how it is interpreted by historians – what counts as “history” and for whom – is a well-understood part of doing good history. Unfortunately, there is no equivalent standard “futuriography” in the foresight field, despite it being absolutely fundamental to understanding the value of our own predictions as, similarly, highly determined by the epistemic configurations of their production. It is here that Samuel very competently fills a much needed gap.
The practical implication of this, which Future does not get into – it’s not that kind of book – is that to make better predictions (or make valid assessments of others’ predictions) we need to ask stiff questions as to how much of what we foresee is determined by the perspectives of today, and expect the answer to be “very much.” Understanding the limitations and biases of our own perspective is the sine-qua-non of a robust view of what tomorrow will actually bring.
Posted by Adam Gordon on Jun 24, 2009 in all, decision-making, foresight tools & methods, Future Savvy, management, managing uncertainty, risk management, strategic foresight
Peter Bernstein, the author of “Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk,” died recently at the age of 90. In memoriam McKinsey Quarterly reposted this recent Bernstein interview. I put it up here because it’s a timely and timeless lesson in thinking about uncertainty and threats, and avoiding simplistic (quantitative) approaches to managing them – one of core themes of “Future Savvy.” Bernstein offers and endorsement of real options and explains why sophisticated Long Term Capital Management (LTCM) mathematical models to control risk created “a math dependency” that was blind to, among other things, unexpected systemic feedback to its own emergence:
One of the first things Bernstein says is that risk implies that we don’t know what will happen, which could be good things happening too. Risk management, as it is currently understood, gets executives to look at what could go wrong in the uncertain future of the enterprise. (Somehow threats are easier than opportunties to get departmental budget for.) The standard approach is to break risks down into commonly understood threat categories: a typical analysis would illuminated risks posed by technology failure, communications failure, security failure, natural disasters, accidents, or market/reputation risk, liability risk, financial/credit risk, and so on. This negative-outcome identification is typically followed by strategies to monitor, minimize, or control the risk event or its impact.
Doing all this is great, BUT it is just a narrow part of enterprise and industry foresight. Why? First, industry foresight or futures studies for business is focused as much on the opportunities change offers as on threats. Second, foresight tools (when correctly applied) set themselves the task of enlarging perspectives or mental maps so that we can see more things, or more possibilities than the generally expected set (whether good or bad). Set against this, risk management is little more than the catalog of known threats. The unknown or poorly understood threat, or unseen opportunity missed (and grabbed by others) is likely to be more damaging to the enterprise.
read morePosted by Adam Gordon on Jun 3, 2009 in all, economy & finance, failed predictions, forecast filtering, Future Savvy, leadership, management, Perils of Prediction
Normally I make a point of not reposting anything put up elsewhere, but this small list of foresight lessons deserves broader attention than just Electronics Weekly. According to EW blogger David Manners, Tsuyoshi Kawanishi, former CEO of Toshiba Semiconductors in his book Chip Management quotes 10 wisdoms of forecasting, see below.
They have a bit of the fashionable “SunTzu Art of War” feel to them, and some of the quotes may be apocryphal. But no matter. What’s really interesting in this very savvy list is how customer-focused the lessons are. As said in Future Savvy, and one can’t say it too many times, what customers (users, the public) want and the cost-benefit tradeoffs they will make is a MUCH more reliable guide to the future than any techno-fantasy.
The wisdoms also reflect a foresight industry insider truism and paradox: you seldom get to the future by asking the customer directly (e.g. in a focus group) what they would like to have. You have to leap for the customer (and use focus groups only to refine new offerings.)
The list:
“1. St Augustine said that it is a blessing from God that we can’t predict the future. If we predict prosperity, we will become complacent. If we predict evil, we will lose the ability to discriminate.
2 Sharp President Haruo Tsuji: ‘You cannot find out what the consumer wants only by doing market research. You need to pull the ideas out of your brain. Manufacturers of the future should not simply respond to market demands, they must create market demands.’
3. Konosuke Matsushita said: ‘Don’t try to fit your business to a forecast. Fit it to the needs of your customers.’
4. Toshiba President Sugiichio Watari: ‘Money doesn’t come falling into the headquarters of Toshiba. If you want money you need to go to the customers.’
5. President Yoshio Tateishi of Omron: ‘Learn from your customers. If you learn from internal resources you will become self-satisfied. If you learn from your competitors you will fall far behind.’
6. Professor Yoshiya Teramoto of Meiji Gakuin University: ‘When companies start a big market research project, it is one sign of the ‘big company’ disease.’
7. Tsuyoshi Kawanishi: ‘The way to predict the weather is to look at the sky. And, every once in a while, you can make your prediction by simply thinking.’
8. President Haruo Tsuji of Sharp says: ‘Don’t be a spider, be a honey bee.’
9. Takeshi Kaneda, a management critic, says: ‘After elaborate research to find out what the consumer wants, Ford produced the Edsel. It was a complete failure. Ford mistook what the customer wanted for what they would really buy. They ignored their insight and relied on consensus. Japanese tend to emphasize harmony and consensus. But insight and decisiveness can be more important.’
10. Someone says: ‘Figures do not lie. But liars often use figures.’”
read morePosted by Adam Gordon on May 6, 2009 in all, decision-making, failed predictions, forecast filtering, foresight tools & methods, Future Savvy, leadership, management, strategic foresight
I’ve been quite careful not to use this blog as a “brag wall” for Future Savvy. I can say reviewers have all been glowing, without exception. But this review, below, which recently appeared in the St Andrews Management Institute’s Vector Magazine, I felt was worth reposting here because – more than just saying nice things – it also captures the essence of what the book is trying to do. Here it is:
Book reviews by SAMI fellows and associates
“Future Savvy” by Adam Gordon (American Management Association, 2009)
“Forecasts and predictions are ubiquitous. We are bombarded with views of the future on a plethora of subjects from myriad sources, with a diverse set of motivations and self-interests. Adam Gordon seeks to provide a practical users guide to the assessment and interpretation of all things about the future, with special emphasis on the cautions and ‘health warnings’ that need to be applied, so as not to be misled by forecasts. However, the author is careful not to veer towards over-cynical dismissal of all future projections; rather, he seeks to provide guidance to the reader on how to apply the necessary caveats, and in the author’s words “profit from change”.
The book covers a very broad field, from the basic issues of the misuse of data and statistics, covering the quality and validity of data as well as their misinterpretation, through technology forecasting, trend and horizon scanning to quantitative modelling and scenarios. The one theme common to all these activities is the need to be alert to bias, whether it be a deliberate motive to influence behaviour through a dire prediction; or a bias inherent in futurologists needing to see rapid and pervasive change in all areas of society – if it exists or not – and evangelising it.
The track record of much futurology is mixed. Well-known examples are quoted: television did not lead to the end of the cinema industry. Nor has space exploration led to people taking foreign holidays on other planets – yet! Bias may also lie in the beholder. The ‘Zeitgeist’ tendency, whereby we are all influenced by contemporary perceptions, affects not only how “experts” and professionals see the world, but also how the audience receives the views of the future – often with unprepared minds. The internal “official future” of an organisation can pose a real blind spot to its progress.
The weaknesses of much quantitative modelling are highlighted, with such forecasts only being as good as the assumptions on which they are based, but which are often not overtly stated. In contrast to the conceptual and practical errors inherent in much futures output, the role and advantages of scenario planning are emphasised as a tool for challenging assumptions and developing alternative futures: “It’s better to be vaguely right than precisely wrong”.
The penultimate chapter takes examples of relatively recent forecasts from a range of organisations, whose subjects range from US agricultural production to UK dementia sufferers. These are subjected to a form of ‘retro wind-tunnelling’ to illustrate the deficiencies in their construction and how they would have benefited from the application of methodologies described earlier in the book. The final chapter provides a summary checklist, or framework, to apply in evaluating forecasts and future predictions.
Adam Gordon has written a shrewd and perceptive book that deserves a wide readership, especially among managers in both the private and public sectors, as well as the familiar ‘general reader’. Those wishing a more detailed technical guide to the various forecasting and futurist methodologies will need to consult other standard works. Professionals in the fields of management and strategy consulting and scenario practitioners might well be familiar with many of the points made in the book. However, those with some savvy might do well to recommend the book to their clients.
Michael Owen, 20 April 2009
read morePosted by Adam Gordon on Apr 22, 2009 in 2015, 2025, all, emerging technologies, failed predictions, forecast filtering, Future Savvy, horizon scanning, innovation, lifestyles & values, Perils of Prediction, social change, technology change
A basic tool of foresight work is horizon scanning, that is, scanning for signals of change, early portent of trends, straws in the wind of change. Futurists do it habitually, and if not habitually then – the wisdom is – do it routinely by consciously scanning sources of information you don’t normally. Buying an agricultural weekly or teen idol rag at the airport, rather than your standard dose of the Economist.
It was in this spirit that I picked up the UK launch issue (aka May 2009) of Wired. Actually it’s not the first launch. Wired was in the UK ten years ago, but Condé Nast withdrew it in the dot.com crash. In the US at the time, I remember when Wired, the poster child of the Silicon Valley / Nasdaq bonanza, was almost as thick as a phone book each month. But those days were soon over.
Anyway, who could resist an offering that was about to tell me about my “Life in the future. “Fake Meat, Robots and Electro-Sex: the World is About to Change.” On the cover are, I kid you not, flying cars!
Now, I wouldn’t take this stuff seriously for a moment, if everyone else promised not to. But they don’t. So here we go. In the “What’s Next?” cover story 46 experts make 99 predictions about the next 40 years, and none of them will happen, or not in the time frame expressed.
Oh, moon settlement?
I shrink from sharing the list. Meal replacement patches, check. Moon settlement, check. The male pill, check. Every techno-fantasy of the jockish sci-fi world, check. Well, let’s stop on the male pill for a moment. Can we not do it? Sure we can do it – today. What’s stopping it is not technology. It is attitudes (machismo, essentially). So Wired experts are telling us that this will go away in a decade. Puh-leez.
I hardly need mention there’s no method given behind any of these expert forecasts.
Don’t you think Wired should be asking themselves why, in 2009, they are producing 186 pages of dead tree and carting it around the country in carbon-emitting trucks? Technology-vision may lead you to a view of the future. But it’s unreliable. The future is determined by what consumers are ready for. Well, that’s one of the 20-or-so key forecast filtering principles of Future Savvy.
Perhaps we should look at the cover story for what it is really about – which is selling magazines. Because, there’s no doubt that tech is changing, and many new capabilities are coming on stream, and this is very, very fascinating to imagine uses for. And this fascination is what Wired packages and sells. Don’t bet any money on the predictions though, certainly not their timeline.
But sturdy in some areas
Aside from the predicting lark, it’s a good magazine of its kind. The features are well-conceived, well-written, for example, one about how the BBC iPlayer business was built; a feature on sea salvage; a profile of PayPal founder Elon Musk; the David X Li formula and how it mis-calculated risk, and so on. Great stuff. Actually quite a sturdy business-oriented-view of techno-change, if you can get past the boys-with-toys riff of the magazine as a whole.
So, actually, much to like. Just, please, don’t think a lad’s mag is going to tell you anything coherent about the future.
read morePosted by Adam Gordon on Feb 18, 2009 in all, foresight tools & methods, horizon scanning, managing uncertainty, prediction markets
It’s the week of the 81st Academy Awards and this means my automated Internet searches for future predictions are bunged up with blogger & media pundits predicting whether it’s going to be Brad Pitt or Sean Penn; Kate Winslet over Angelina Jolie; Slumdog Millionaire or The Reader, etc. This is just the fun-of-the-fair forecasting of course. But, turns out there are some significant things to talk about from a Future Savvy point of view.
First, there is the prediction game on offer from ABC, taglined: “The Oscars Live Challenge: Think you can Predict a Winner? Make Your Picks Now!”
It’s all part of the marketing drive of course, but, nevertheless how would one play it best and what might that tell us? Let’s assume there is something at stake, like you’re really going to sit in front of the TV and mark off your right vs. wrong predictions, and compare your score with that of your spouse for year-long bragging rights – now there’s pressure – how would you predict? Would you think (a) “this is the best movie so I predict it will win”? Hardly. You would think: (b) “this is the one that I think most people will pick, so that’s the one I think will win.”
You would be making a meta-prediction – going with what you think most are going to choose. In this particular case you would also know that that Oscar winners are chosen by balloting the 6,000 members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. So your more exact question would be: who is this special group likely to choose in each category?
What’s going on? In future situations that are heavily dependent on aggregate human choices – which is very many situations – the savviest predicting strategy is to figure out the choices most people are going to make. Oscars aside, figuring out the choices most people will make on any issue – hybrid cars, tighter securities legislation, public health care, etc. – is an excellent guide to what will really happen. It’s a mass market-led view of the future to be sure, but that’s exactly what makes it dependable in mass-opinion situations. (Not all situations are determined by mass-market choices – predicting a presidential election winner is; predicting a superbowl winner is not.)
Playing the game
I had a shot at the Oscar prediction game, joining the alleged 1,680 other “players” who were then online. From what I could tell via the rather gristly Flash interface is that the game is not (yet) “social” in that you can’t see what other people are predicting – there is no access to aggregate opinion. No matter. One can instantly get this in hundreds of prediction market forums right now, for example Intrade, where the price of each outcome in each Academy Awards category directly reflects how strongly players as a whole have bid up that outcome.
At Intrade, at time of writing, Slumdog Millionaire is at $87.30 (max is $100; the other 4 movies share the remaining $12.70). When used as a prediction this means that the aggregate opinion of people staking real money has been effectively captured: it is that Slumdog Millionaire is 87% likely to be the choice of the Academy members in its category.
This is a guide to Oscar night that I would not bet against if I wanted to hold onto my bragging rights. Even in situations less overwhelmingly agreed on by players, it has been shown that prediction markets, tapping the aggregate “wisdom of crowds” (working like “Ask the audience” on Who Wants to be a Millionaire) are a fabulous tool for capturing what most people think will happen, resulting in excellent predictions. Caveat Emptor: prediction markets are poor at predicting long-term, open-ended situations, particularly where the outcome alternatives are unknown or can’t be clearly bounded, as blogged a few months back.
Posted by Adam Gordon on Jan 30, 2009 in all, decision-making, failed predictions, forecast filtering, Future Savvy, leadership, managing uncertainty, policy, risk management, strategic foresight
All crises of the present can be viewed as a failure of foresight or planning at some previous point, and the current global economic crisis is no different.
The mood is justly sombre at the World Economic Forum’s Davos meeting this year, as grim-faced world leaders mull over the dismal state of the global economy and how to fix it. This is in marked contrast to recent years, when the top executives were warmly congratulating themselves on the general sta
te of things.
In one sense this is perfectly understandable. The crisis is upon us and leaders should be directly and practically involved in tackling it. On another level it’s profoundly disturbing, because world leaders and senior managers should be doing more than merely responding to situations. When crises occur, crisis management becomes part of a leader’s job, but their real job is thinking ahead effectively to avoid crises and, on the positive side, develop opportunities.
Put another way: the heads of a companies or countries – Davos-level people – are tasked far beyond effective daily management. They are tasked, fundamentally, with negotiating the VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous) world on behalf of the rest of us. If not them, then who?
This requires foresight and vision. In this sense, many who are at Davos this week are responsible for the current crisis. They failed to foresee it, in fact they generally endorsed the growth of complex financial instruments, the shadow banking system, and private equity growth –- much of which bypassed SEC or equivalent regulation, and which is now seen to be the root cause of the meltdown.
In fact much of the “new finance” system was thought to spread and therefore actually lower risk. Turns out that was a poor view of the future. In fact the present situation as a whole is the result of key decision-makers operating on a poor view of future. As a group, their mental model was not open to bad outcomes, or even just alternative outcomes to what was commonly expected.
Could we have thunk it?
Their response might be: “nobody can predict the future!” “Easy to say after the event!” This is true. But it’s common knowledge that there were those who foresaw the mess — The Times identified at least 10. As Davos attendees might now be forced to agree, some forecasts are clearly better than others.
This is where executive leaders can learn from the foresight field and particularly the history of failed predictions. Everyone relies on predictions for their guide to the future – nobody can be an expert in every field. And there’s never a shortage of them – they are frequently published in the media, offered by consultancies and think tanks, and are a key part of Davos.
While getting a prediction is easy, the key leadership skill is to be able to tell a good one from a bad one: that’s what turns a forecast into a strategic resource. That is what leads to better decisions, better plans, and better actions.
Can one do that? Can one critically assess a particular or consensus-held view of the future, to identify its strengths and weaknesses? Absolutely yes. Among the tests one can run on a prediction are:
• assessing motivation – who is speaking and what their agenda might be, particularly if they have an interest in maintaining a current system or shaping the emergence of a new one
• determining whether the tools used are appropriate to the level and type of uncertainty faced. High-uncertainty situations and long-term views require different approaches to standard modeling
• questioning consensus mental-models and forcing consideration of alternative outcomes. All foresight is swayed by “zeitgeist” – spirit of the times – and good forecasts swim against this tide.
These are just a few among the many forecast tests one can run, as detailed in Future Savvy. But even if Davos attendees had been applying just these three in previous years, their foresight would have been greatly improved. It won’t help with this crisis, but it might forestall the next.
* This article, authored by Adam Gordon, was first edited and published by Bnet.co.uk
read morePosted by Adam Gordon on Dec 15, 2008 in all, decision-making, failed predictions, forecast filtering, Future Savvy, managing uncertainty, Perils of Prediction, scenario planning, strategic foresight
One of the questions I’m asked a lot is whether Future Savvy would have helped to predict the credit crunch. My response, as in this INSEAD interview, has been that the book gives readers the tools to judge the merits of predictions, so wouldn’t have directly helped predict the financial crisis, but it would have been a key resource in drawing attention to the poor view of the future that bankers and regulators were acting on.
In many ways, focusing on whether “this” or “that” is predicted, or not predicted, is to put the cart before the horse. The horse is the adequacy of our approach to anticipating outcomes and the quality of our foresight as a whole. When this is good, the cart – not missing important changes – will follow.
Credit: http://www.lewrockwell.com/blog
In this, it’s important to realize that many did predict the financial crisis (as many predicted 9/11 in various ways). Sticking with the financial crunch for now: it has generally been portrayed it as a “why-didn’t-anyone-see-it-coming” event. It wasn’t. Hats off to The Times for their October 12 piece: “10 People Who Predicted the Financial Meltdown.”(Summary here). Allowing for a fairly loose definition of “predicted,” the article shows that among those who foresaw the crunch were: Vince Cable, deputy leader of the Liberal Democrats (2003); US congressman Ron Paul (2003); Stephen Roach, senior executive at Morgan Stanley (2004); Christopher Wood – chief strategist of a broking firm in the Asia-Pacific Market (2005); and Nouriel Roubini, economics professor at NYU (2006)… and there were many others.
A different problem
So this reframes the problem entirely. It’s not that the predictions were not there. It was that not enough people believed them and, particularly, important decision-makers didn’t believe them or didn’t have the institutional capacity to respond. So there are two halves to the problem: the ability to see the full spectrum of what may happen, including unexpected outcomes; and the ability to act on what we see. Quality in foresight work – the raison d’etre of Future Savvy – makes it possible to see more outcomes more clearly, and to act with more confidence in choosing what to prepare for. (In the real world we can’t prepare for every outcome.)
There was a good letter published in the FT from eminent futurist Peter Schwartz on December 2, which describes this very well. It shows predictions for what they are (one-horse scenarios), and how decision-makers are typically bound into inaction or wrong action not only by working on the basis of a wrong prediction, but by the predictive mindset itself. This mindset – the habit or culture of picking “one right answer” in the face of a complex situation with many competing outcomes, prematurely closes alternatives and leaves us open to surprise. As Schwartz says, as scenario planners have always said (and he was one of the people who defined the field in the first place), a compelling set of alternative future scenarios encourages decision-makers to recognize unlikely and unpopular outcomes, along with expected outcomes, and therefore to be able to respond earlier and more effectively whatever happens.
Scenarios also contribute to the “act” side of the problem. In a well-done set for the banking industry, a financial-meltdown scenario would at least have been in play, institutionalizing the consideration of less unlikely, less popular outcomes in company and government forums, forcing serious consideration of necessary strategies and contingencies, and therein creating the ability to act early and effectively without having predicted the crisis.
The letter is well worth quoting in full:
Sir, The real question regarding the financial crisis is not, as the Queen asked: “Why did nobody see this coming?” In fact, any number of thoughtful people in academia, politics and business had been compiling the data and sounding warnings for several years.
The question we should be asking is: “Why didn’t decision-makers believe that a global financial meltdown was increasingly likely and then act on that belief?” Or, to put it another way: “What would it take to make decision-makers both believe and act?”
The problem is that decision-makers believe that they are forced to pick one right answer: the most likely scenario. Their approach to decision-making does not afford them the opportunity to consider apparently low probability but highly consequential scenarios. The answer, therefore, to the “believe” half of the question is a decision-making process that considers several scenarios: compelling stories about alternative futures that incorporate the analysis of “outliers” and describe three or four plausible paths forward.
Good scenarios force decision-makers to challenge their own assumptions and reconsider what is possible. As a result, they can take seriously those scenarios that seemed less likely at first, but whose plausibility increases over time.
The second part of the question – “What would it take to act?” – is much harder to address. Suppose that Ben Bernanke or Hank Paulson had come to believe a year or two ago that the house of cards was about to collapse and trigger cascading, global failures. What would they have done, given the realities of the complex interconnected systems at the heart of the problem? Perhaps if they had good scenarios with appropriate indicators to start with, they could have rehearsed different strategies and contingencies. Importantly, these decision-makers could have used these scenarios to persuade others on all sides of the issue also to recognise the complexity of the impending crisis in a more timely way. It’s never easy to convince everyone around you that the game they have been playing to their great benefit is about to change. But with a shared recognition of the magnitude of the risks and the ways they might unfold, they could have acted far earlier to prevent some of the dire consequences that have occurred, let alone what is to come.
read morePosted by Adam Gordon on Dec 3, 2008 in 2015, all, emerging technologies, failed predictions, forecast filtering, innovation, technology change, trend tracking
I finally got to look at Kevin Kelly’s TED presentation on “the next 5,000 days of the Web,” and bring it up here because it’s really worthy of comment from a foresight quality – Future Savvy – point of view.
Kelly needs no introduction. He’s the executive editor of Wired and a core who’s-who in the new media technology world. The first lesson he has to share is a key one: the Web is only about 5,000 days old – that’s about 13 years (the Internet, DARPA, etc., is older) – and all the stuff we have and now take for granted, from online investing to social networking to Wikipedia has happened in this short time.
The video is available here:
As Kelly says, and he’s undoubtedly right: “if I had predicted all this would be there (and free) nobody would have believed it. It’s impossible. The lesson is that very big changes do occur in fast-moving industries when considered over a decent-length (e.g. 10-15 year) timeframe. So let’s not kid ourselves: mere extrapolation of current trends doesn’t take us to the future. A leap – a paradigm shift – a willingness to anticipate fundamental shifts in technologies, institutions, and business models, is required.
So, against this, it is interesting that much of what Kelly predicts for the next 5,000 days of the Web is fairly conservative… but he does build in the idea of a new, fundamental shift.
The Web in 2020
What does he see coming in the next 5,000 days?
1. First thing is what Kelly calls “Embodiment” of the Web, by which he means that every device, every screen (laptop, phone, iPod, sat-nav, etc) becomes a “window into the machine” rather than a stand-alone device. There will be one Web, one machine, and everything will go through it. Part of this is that the Web will be embedded into the physical world – inanimate objects from cars to shoes to will have connectivity. Whether through RFID or other technologies, “there will be an Internet of things.”
Hello? We’ve heard this all before. Many times. In fact we were hearing it in the 90s. This doesn’t mean it’s wrong. In fact if we’ve been hearing it for so long, and the trend is still clearly in this direction, the forecast is probably right. What’s interesting is how non-radical it is.
2. Next he talks about “Restructuring” which is his term for the “Semantic Web” or what some call “Web 3.0” The idea is: first we linked computers (the Net), then we linked pages (the Web), and next we will link all the data or information or ideas anywhere on the Web to all relevant data /information/ ideas elsewhere on the Web. (This made possible by technologies such as XML, RSS, OWL, API, RDF)
One of the payoffs of this, says Kelly in an illuminating example, is that we won’t have to “re-friend” in each social networking platform. The technology will know we’re “friends” with Warren Buffet and Tom Peters and Malcolm Gladwell (…lol) as we move from Linked-In to Facebook to Technorati, and so on.
3. Kelly’s final point is that humans will be co-dependent with the Web. It will be always on, always there, ubiquitous, and the single fundamental tool we depend on to do everything.
Again, there’s nothing new in these points. It’s all been said before. In fact, as is often the case in good futures thinking, the value in Kelly’s forecast is that it is a carefully considered “cut” from what is usually forecast, leaving behind the wilder things that are said. Kelly on Web 2020 doesn’t say “expect digital human implants; ‘conscious’ devices; retina-as-screen,” and so on – the beam-me-up-Scotty kind of foresight that unfortunately often gets the headlines.
The next stage
Nevertheless, he is equally not saying the next 5,000 days will be “like the Web, only better.” The capabilities, the embodiment, the dependency, imply a new stage, he says. What that new stage will look like at the business and institutional level – what products/services/delivery will be possible via Web 3.0 – what the Yahoo or Google or Facebook or similar iconic institutions will there be, Kelly does not get into.
Fully thinking through the next 5,000 days of the Web involves going from the capabilities to what is built on them. But all in all this is a classy, integrated piece of future thinking (that easily fulfills the Questions to Ask of any Forecast checklist in Chapter 11 of “Future Savvy”) and is a solid foundation on which to consider future business and organizational implications.
read morePosted by Adam Gordon on Oct 8, 2008 in 2025, all, emerging technologies, forecast filtering, foresight tools & methods, Future Savvy, horizon scanning, innovation, lifestyles & values, Perils of Prediction, social change, strategic foresight, systems dynamics, technology change
My attention was struck by an advertisement in The Times on October 1, 2008 (on a plane to NY – for better or worse this paper not a routine part of my daily diet) that offered a “LP2CD” machine that transfers vinyl records to CD directly.
This is the item:
There’s nothing new about this of course – the product has been around for a while, and ways to take vinyl and digitize it have been offered since the CD became the music industry standard in the mid-1980s. What’s interesting is that it is still being offered in 2008, more than 20 years after the technology transition. And still being bought, despite a sticker price of gpb 299 (nearly $600. In fact, this is the special newspaper-tie-in deal price.) The producers and marketers have, no doubt, done their homework: there are still enough people out there with vinyl records to justify a product and a campaign, including big newspaper spots that don’t come cheap.
What does this tell us about the future, and about predictions? It illustrates a key principle in thinking circumspectly and more accurately about the future. Legacy investments and legacy situations are a reality. They often represent a significant slice of daily practice or market share, well beyond the time when things have, officially, moved on. For all practical purposes, in any future the past continues to exist for a long time.
A slow and measured exit
This is common sense. But often missed by breathless techo-forecasters whose eyes are fixed on the next new thing. The implication of many forecasts is, when a new technology emerges into the market (which often takes longer than expected) that is also when previous solutions fall away. Not so. Yes, sometimes a new product is clearly advantageous, and adoption is rapid and pervasive. But when there are real investments in prior systems and technologies, these typically work their way out of people’s lives slowly, often over generations. The transition takes longer than we think it will.
While they are still part of the picture, legacy systems work against change (“This is working fine for me, why should I shift?” or “I’ve invested heavily in this, I can’t afford to shift”). On the other hand, as evidenced by the LP2CD in 2008, opportunities in the legacy system, or in facilitating a transition to the new system, may exist and be significatn long after everyone’s attention has moved on.
There are legacies in all kinds of products and services. A case that is currently pertinent, as discussed in Future Savvy, is the existence of deep legacies in the automobile industry and gasoline-petroleum supply chain. Both petroleum supply constraints and carbon emissions worries are driving hybrid engines, new fuels, and renewable forms of energy (technology is not the obstacle here) but the reality is that we are all deeply invested in a legacy petroleum-automobile system, from the well to the refinery to the factory to the forecourt. Even when new / alternative energies are proven, reliable, and equal in price and performance, the legacy will continue to exist, and it will erode gradually, as companies or consumers slowly renew their investment over time. Of course regulatory or social pressure can accelerate the incremental process, but nothing can make it vanish.
This means, in this example, there’s no possibility of a sudden change in individual land-based transport solutions. Whatever comes along will have to emerge into and live side-by-side with past systems and infrastructure for a very long time.
Legacy as luxury
Here’s another principle of legacy systems surviving into the future. There are many examples where a surpassed technology remains in existence, but moves into a niche or luxury market. The car replaced the bicycle and the horse, but both continue to enjoy massive popularity. In the developed world, more bicycles are sold than ever in history, but these are primarily for exercise or leisure. Horses, once widely distributed through society as instruments of work, are still part of a very active industry, but this industry is about leisure and/or gambling. Similarly, electricity replaced candles as our primary means of illumination, but candles are everywhere – associated with mood and romance rather than functionality. Ball-point pens squeezed the fountain pen off the table, but that merely freed the fountain pen to become an icon of status and refinement.
Posted by Adam Gordon on Sep 16, 2008 in all, emerging technologies, failed predictions, Future Savvy
In the MBA elective “Industry Foresight and Scenario Planning” that I teach, toward the beginning of Day One, I ask participant some very basic questions – basic questions being, of course, the hardest. One of them is: Can We Predict the Future, Yes or No?
Being graduate students, they’ve learned to prevaricate, and they do. It’s either No, with a bit of yes; or Yes with a bit of no. Both are correct or course. Clearly nobody can see the future perfectly, but there do seem to be times and/or situation where some see it much more clearly than others. (And therefore make better forecasts. How one can recognize this is a core topic of “Future Savvy.”)
Anyway, I’m reminded of this because I stumbled on two Web links, one after the other, that are salvos in this debate. The first is at:
http://picasso.rediffiland.com/blogs/2008/09/08/Predicting-the-Future-We-veall-hear.html
This is very much the standard, smirking, “look-see-bigCheese-got-egg-on-his-face” testimonial, of which there are many. Bloggers are, in many ways, journalists, and all journos like to see a big-shot egg-faced.
The other link is a fun 3-min video, posted on the Disney blog, see
which is at
http://thedisneyblog.com/2008/09/08/how-good-was-disney-at-predicting-the-future/
The clip argues, possibly slightly tongue in cheek, that the Disney forecasts as portrayed “Horizons,” EPCOT in 1983 – 25 years ago – were, in fact, not bad predictions. (Context is Disney’s tomorrow visions have, generally, been discredited.)
Back to the smirk site, above, which bears further thinking about. This one is hardly original (why do they all have the same 20 quotes? They also normally start with the Yogi Berra-ism “Predicting is hard, especially about the future.” Yawn) but at least they all correctly put us on our guard as to the poor future thinking of industry experts. In fact, the record of future prediction is littered with the most astounding mistakes. From underwater cities never built to rocket mail that never flew to Y2K disasters that never materialized – the list of laughable errors is a mile long. Experts aside, all of us are liable to confidently anticipate things that wont happen while missing what is brewing right under their noses.
Prediction-skepticism
Fair enough. But, the predictive nihilism behind these smirk sites is is dangerous in a number of ways.
First it promotes the skepticism that “we cant know anything” about the future. If the experts were so wrong – let’s all just give up. And therein we get the problem of many people, including highly-paid managers, justifying ignoring or under-funding future thinking. Sometimes managers, not wanting to look unprepared, suggest resources and expertise be channeled into “fast response” so that when the future becomes clear they can move rapidly to profit. This view is soundly rubbished in Hamel & Prahalad’s classic HBR 1994 article “Competing For The Future,” and I don’t think more needs to be said.
Second, there’s obviously no science behind the smirk. They pointedly do not show the number or extent of incorrect forecasts *in context of the total forecasts made*. We don’t know, in other words, how many people got it right or at least right enough to have profited or avoided losses. Wherever you have significant success, it is likely that there is a good-enough forecast behind it.
Finally the failed-forecast smirk lists also miss the fact that many forecasts are not meant to be an accurate anticipation of events. Many are trying to influence the future, that is, talk a particular outcome into being or shape it, or stop it from happening. People make predictions to sway an audience, or get a response from authorities or opposing forces. When Gates said: “640K should be enough for anyone,” who was he talking to, and what was he trying to achieve …? A real prediction of the future? I think not. Microsoft did not stop at 640, and nor did anyone think it would. And nor did Gates think anyone else would. Forecasts are often salvos in the games of power and influence, flagrantly used to marshal situations or promote self-interests, in situations where accuracy is not the point.
read morePosted by Adam Gordon on Aug 20, 2008 in all, failed predictions, foresight tools & methods, Future Savvy, prediction markets
Hmm. As the 2008 White House race hots up, we’re going to be hearing more and more – and then even more – about who prediction markets forecast to win, so it’s time to put down a thought or two about uses and limitation of this forecasting tool.
First, what’s if all about? If you already know, skip this section. Let’s start with the example in yesterday’s Telegraph: “Predicting the future – with the power of betting” Paul Parsons, August 19, 2008. As Parson’s reports, the University of Iowa is running a market where investors can buy “shares” in the two major US election candidates, each priced between $0 and $1. On election day, traders holding stock in the winner – Obama or McCain – receive $1 per share while the others lose their money. Investors can buy and sell their shares along the way, and as they do this the candidate more people will want to own (because they think he will win) will get more expensive. In other words, market forces will drive up the price of the outcome more people think more likely. As of August 19, the trading value of the Obama, at $0.62, suggests participants expect a 62 percent chance he will win. (Another prediction market site, midasoracle.org, has the figure currently at 59.8 percent.)
Prediction markets mimic stock market and deploy much the same software. Where a real market trades shares in an underlying asset, in a prediction market it is future outcomes which are “securitized”. The key principle at work is the sage market wisdom that “the price of a stock captures all the information known about it” – that is, all information is factored into the price (notwithstanding that some may have more or better information than others; some may be acting more wisely on their information). Therefore price is our guide to the cumulative knowledge of all participants and, in prediction markets, this “price discovery” allows us to know what most people think the future holds. They allow the “the wisdom of crowds” to be turned to a future problem, and tapped.
Serious Success
What’s exciting about all this is its success rate. Prediction markets are amazingly accurate in many circumstances, and by all accounts consistently beat more conventional quantitative and extrapolative methods. Prediction markets have consistently out-predicted election opinion polls and exit polls. Of course the predictive potential goes way beyond polling. Forecasting markets can and have been set up to predict the dollar movements to the success of same-sex marriage legislation, to who will win best actor Oscar. At one point there was even a US government market in future terror targets (trying to elicit public predictions of likely targets so as to plan accordingly) but this was deemed inappropriate and taken down.
As it has become clear that this method outstrips conventional forecasting methods, prediction markets have taken root in forward-looking businesses. Companies such as Google and Hewlett-Packard routinely use (internal) prediction markets to forecast sales figures, customer preferences, product adoption, and so on. HP is on the record as saying prediction markets consistently outperform their official forecasts.
The method has other advantages too. First, it requires no special techniques or expense. There are no fancy models to apply or complex algorithms to … to do whatever one does with such things. Second the forecasts are available in real time, all the time, and constantly update themselves. There’s no waiting for data collectors to collect, or statisticians to emerge with their answers.
The Limits
In my book, Future Savvy, I show how and why humans are poor at predicting, for dozens of reasons. The record of predicting is littered with failure. But, is that now all in the past? Do prediction markets solve the perennial problem of predicting the future, or at least get us closer? Yes and no.
Yes where prediction markets are appropriate. They work best under two conditions: first where there is a clear view of the options and operating conditions; second (related) where the time frame predicted is relatively short, usually under 18 months depending how fast things are moving. Where predicting the future means choosing between known alternatives, such as an election winner, or anticipating a point along a known continuum, for example the level of next year’s sales, prediction markets are great.
Where prediction markets run dry is in dealing with unfamiliar conditions, or unknown variables, or potential game-changing disjunctures in the world. Where the future is seriously fuzzy, where there are many variables, and the way they interact unknown, and drivers, blockers, and lags are hidden, prediction markets are of limited use because the outcomes can’t be framed adequately so that people can bet on them or against them. A prediction market for US president in 2012 would be far less useful than 2008. Similarly, while a market for the oil price in 2009 would be helpful, by 2010 or beyond factors driving the price may be so different (viz. developments in sustainable energy or geopolitics) that the result of a prediction market conducted in 2008 would be undependable.
So while prediction markets sort out probabilities between known likelihoods, they are not adequate to the task of investigating complex situations where we cannot frame the likely outcomes, or at least can’t know if we’ve framed them right. Also while prediction markets do help us, on aggregate, avoid some perceptual/cognitive fallacies, they are as likely as any other predictive tool to fall into the Zeitgeist effect. More on this soon…
A good list of articles on prediction markets is available here: http://www.midasoracle.org/best/
read morePosted by Adam Gordon on Jul 9, 2008 in 2015, 2025, all, decision-making, failed predictions, forecast filtering, foresight tools & methods, Future Savvy, horizon scanning, leadership, managing uncertainty, Perils of Prediction, scenario planning, strategic foresight, strategic planning, systems dynamics, technology change, trend tracking
The book Future Savvy shows readers how to critically judge forecasts for themselves. These are the chapters that take the reader there:
Chapter 1: Recognizing Forecast Intentions, deals with considerations of how forecasts come about, who makes them, and with what intention. Those who research and produce forecasts, those who invest in understanding trends and drivers of change, and those (including the media) who bring the forecasts and their implications to our attention, inevitably have reasons for doing so – to benefit from the knowledge by seizing opportunities or avoiding threats or by affecting outcomes in the world. Understanding a forecast’s “return on investment” gives us an important vantage point in assessing the merits of a forecast.
Chapter 2: The Quality of Information, shows how a forecast communicates information between forecaster and reader subject to the same standards of accuracy, truth-telling, and bias-control by which one would judge any communication. Forecasts can be very different in methods and goals, but all forecasts lay claim to factual truth, particularly truth in the data, and the argument deals with the various ways in which data can be less solid than it looks, even with the best intentions.
Chapter 3: Interpretation and Bias, considers how data – whether good or bad in itself – can be interpreted or misinterpreted in forecasting, that is, the “political” aspects of forecasting. Just as there is no value-free look at history, so too there is no value-free look to the future and asking the right questions allows us be ready to mentally rebalance forecasts that are presented.
Chapter 4: Paradigms and Perception, investigates how predictive statements are exposed to a broader form of interpretive bias that has to do with the forecaster’s mental model or “paradigm,” and the “zeitgeist” (spirit of the times) when the forecast is made. This chapter investigates situations where forecast failure is caused by failure to escape society’s current mental models – which often do not hold through the forecast period.
Chapter 5: The Utility Principle, considers economic and market forces, and the role of consumers, in promoting or resisting the future. Without reigning in creative thinking, some simple economic filters inevitably apply direction or timing realism to futurist flights of fancy.
Chapter 6: Drivers, Blockers, and Trends, consider drivers and blockers of change, and how viewing these dynamics improves forecast assessment. It identifies the roles of Drivers, Enablers, Friction, and Blockers acting on events to cause change or resist it, and problems in dumbly projecting current trends.
Chapter 7: The Limits of Quantitative Analysis, discusses the role of statistical analysis and quantitative modeling in predicting the future – where this is possible and useful and where it is not, and why not.
Chapter 8: The Systems Perspective, investigates “system effects,” which occur whenever different elements or variables that may appear isolated are in fact linked together, such that changes in one element cause changes in others. Anticipating future behavior of any variable hinges on identifying the broader systemic elements influencing it and failing to do this is a big part of what causes forecasts to fail.
Chapter 9: Living with Alternative Futures, investigates non-predictive ways of approaching change – where the tone is more about managing uncertainty than predicting the future. It acknowledges unfathomable complexity of most future questions and provides perspectives that raise chances of success in an inherently unpredictable future.
Chapter 10: Forecast Filtering in Action, illustrates the processes of the book by applying them in case studies to real-world sample forecasts that decision makers in business and policy areas might find themselves interacting with. This demonstrates how real everyday predictive material may be probed and critically evaluated, following the principles developed in previous chapters.
Chapter 11: A Forecast Filtering Checklist, is a cross-cutting checklist which summarizes the principles of the book in one convenient, thematic list.
read morePosted by Adam Gordon on Jun 27, 2008 in all, Future Savvy
Predictive statements are all around us: in the newspapers, on TV, at conference presentations, in industry reports, consulting documents, think tank studies, and so on. All claim to be valid, but the record shows that many are not. This book is about how to critically interact with and evaluate forecasts. It’s a how-to book for policy people and managers, specifically, how to judge whether a forecast is valid or not, or under what conditions it can be depended on. It is written to help decision makers in commercial, policy, and nonprofit sectors, as well as ordinary people in daily life, make better judgments about predictions they read and hear, so they can appropriately plan for and profit from the future.
Obvious background to all this is that rapid change is a constant, ubiquitous feature of our lives. Important changes across society, technology, institutions, and products and services are constantly occurring. But the future is not merely interesting, it is competitive: the earlier and clearer we see future circumstances, the better we will be able to benefit by changing our current recipes for success – to keep up with the changes in the world. The better managers’ view of the future, the better their decisions will turn out to be. So, change matters, and managers in business or policy realms have to correctly anticipate change. And therefore they turn to and depend on predictions of others. One might say that forecasts are a crucial decision-success resource. But these forecasts are often badly done or done with a purpose to influence the future (that is, not just to predict it). Therefore decision-makers need to be able to judge how good a forecast is – so as to know how to or whether to factor it into their world view. Managers need to be able to critically judge predictive statements to be able determine which ideas are worth taking seriously – worth planning for and investing in.
The book sets out to communicate tools and approaches that the forecast consumer can use to filter and evaluate statements about the future, and thus judge what the real threats and opportunities are. It summarizes and orders the problems common in forecasting, as well as best practices, so that managers and decision makers of all types may be better able to critically interact with the barrage of forecasts that compete for their attention and resources and discriminate between worthy and unworthy ones.
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