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 non-profit 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.

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 to neutrally 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.