As someone who is responsible for
writing forecasts regularly I found the differentiation between predictions and
forecasts to be refreshing, and something I am forced to explain time and again
whenever I present to a new client. Forecasting is something which we do all
the time we just usually call it guessing; but it seems like as budding social
scientists we have a hard time putting that regular practice at forecasting
into our work. Now granted, forecasting is a little bit more than just guessing
(often more like fiction writing), but at its core it is just you as the
forecaster just looking at possibilities and fleshing out what those
possibilities would look like during the time period of the scenario.
I have found that more often than
not the outlier scenarios (alien invasions, nukes…etc) hang us up as we feel
like there are too many variables changing for us to do anything useful in our
scenario writing. However as we heard in our lecture there are some hard and
fast rules (the weak always seek more power, and the powerful seek to keep it)
and as a result of these rules we can often limit the number of variables which
change in our scenarios while still making them relevant. As we heard, it is
important to spell out our assumptions, so as to make these scenarios useful
even if they are totally wrong (by understanding how we got to our conclusions
our consumers can adjust their mental models based on how circumstances
actually begin to play out); it is also important to understand that as a rule
our scenarios will be wrong. The sooner we accept this, the sooner we can have
an easier time writing scenarios.
Sorry for the quasi-lecture; I just
really enjoy scenario writing (or as I said earlier, fiction writing), and like
helping people see that it is easier to do than we may think.
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