Sometimes you read an article and wish you’d read it much earlier. Kinda like when I visited Japan in 2012 and regretted immediately that it took 28 years to visit.
This is one of those instances. Paul Saffo’s essay is a classic with great examples and insights. Read the original at Harvard Business Review. Below I rephrase his 6 rules to aid my own understanding (a practice that I find helpful).
Rule 1: Don’t predict AN outcome; predict a RANGE of likely outcomes
A good boundary is one made up of elements lying on the ragged edge of plausibility. They are outcomes that might conceivably happen but make one uncomfortable even to contemplate.
Rule 2: Visualize the S Curve – specifically, when you think growth will take off, and when it will slow or come to an end
Consider Columbus’s 1492 voyage. His discovery falls at the inflection point of Western exploration. Columbus was not the first fifteenth-century explorer to go to the New World—he was the first to make it back
Rule 3: Embrace the strange, the outliers. Very often that’s the future
The first Grand Challenge, which offered a $1 million prize, was held in March 2004. Most of the robots died in sight of the starting line, and only one robot got more than seven miles into the course. The Challenge’s ambitious goal looked as remote as the summit of Everest. But just 19 months later, at the second Grand Challenge, five robots completed the course.
Rule 4: Strong opinions, weakly held
In forecasting, as in navigation, lots of interlocking weak information is vastly more trustworthy than a point or two of strong information […] once researchers have gone through the long process of developing a beautiful hypothesis, they have a tendency to ignore any evidence that contradicts their conclusion.
Rule 5: Study the past…then go further
The recent past is rarely a reliable indicator of the future—if it were, one could successfully predict the next 12 months of the Dow or Nasdaq by laying a ruler along the past 12 months and extending the line forward. But the Dow doesn’t behave that way, and neither does any other trend. You must look for the turns, not the straightaways, and thus you must peer far enough into the past to identify patterns.
Rule 6: Forecasts are a tool to be used sparingly and strategically
But the Berlin Wall came crashing down in the fall of 1989, and with it crumbled the certainty of a forecast rooted in the assumption of a world dominated by two superpowers. A comfortably narrow cone dilated to 180 degrees, and at that moment the wise forecaster would have refrained from jumping to conclusions and instead would have quietly looked for indicators of what would emerge from the geopolitical rubble
If you like to think about and study the future, a quick plug for Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock [Amazon]. Published in 1970, its specific conclusions are dated but the questions that he asks and the methods that he uses are not.