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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. |
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