Agenda Packets - 1989/01/09 - Laserfiche WebLink

Home Browse Search

2 The Follies of Forecasting By Sherry Schiller Many of you have asked if COUNTDOWN 2001 is a futures organization or if I consider myself a futurist. I'd like to respond to these questions, and invite your comments. Generally, futurists are in the business of forecasting the future. Some use "scientific" techniques such as trend analysis to tell us what the future will be like. Others are more imaginative and irtuitivc. Regardless of the techniques used, futurists and forecasters often help us focus on the "most likely" or probable occurrences in the future. Forecasting is most useful in stable times. However, in a quickly -changing world such as ours, forecasting becomes less useful and more risky. Its major effect may be to give us a self - deceptive sense of control or knowledge of the future and events shaping it. Assuming that trends will continue based on thew past patterns may be hazardous to our health. It's what NASA did in the Challenger launch, with tragic results. Today, with everything so intricately interconnected, it is difficult to predict what causes will produce which effects. Forecasters tend to focus on probabilities to the exclusion of future possibilities and preferabilities. Today, possibilities and preferabilides are at least as important as probabilities. The unforeseen occurrences, like the assassination of President Kennedy, are more influential in shaping history than the events that are predicted by fun rists and reported on widely by the media. It is dangerous to base your activities on the forecasts of futurists whose biases and assumptions are unknown to you. Recently, I attended d workshop condu.ted by the senior economic forecaster of an internationally -known computer fum. Before presenting his global forecasts, he projected onto a screen the following long-term global assumptions upon which all of his forecasts have been based: 1. No major armed conflicts. 2. Normal agricultural crop and livestock production. 3. Real price of crude oil holds at $14-15 per ba-rel. 4. Foreign exchange value of the US $ holds near recent levels. 5. Value and volume of world trade grows. I was amazed that, when I asked what his company would do if any of the assumptions did not hold true, he had no reply. They had no contingency plans! We at COUNTDOWN 2001 see ourselves as educators, not futurists. Our goal is that of all good education --to prepare people to be more effective citizens in the future. We believe it is mote useful to think of trends as = of tse factors that will shape the future, along win chance and human choice. We help people maximize the role Ikk informed choices Rlay i11 shARiny the future and minimize the impact of trends and chance. It is useful to look at trends and thew possible consegnences. But focusing exclusively on trends can make us feel that these large forces in motion are out of our control —cut of anyone's control --and we can only run into one valley or another to hide as they, like great glaciers, roll down over its. The truth is that everyone forecasts, can improve this skill, and should add it to a host of others that will help them successfully navigate the future. Part of COUNTDOWN 2001's mission is to help people learn to examine probabilities, and place them in the context of possibilities and preferabilities for the future. We at COUNTDOWN 2001 believe the limo for "studying" the future is past. It's time for informed, responsible action. The time for doomsday prophesies that nobody can affect is past It's time for positive images of the future to guide our actions in the present We all need to identify and act on our own piece of the planetary puzzle. COUNTDOWN 2001 strives to DEMYS"VY the future so that people --business, community, and government leaders, high school students and writers --feel EMPOWERED and EQUIPPED to create a tY ".^r future for themselves and others. Famous Foolish Forecasts "Space travel is utter bilge." Dr. Richard van der Riet Wooley, some years after President Eisenhower announced the Satellite Program, Me ordinary horseless carriages at present a luxury for the wealthy; and although its prig will probably fall in the future, it will never, of course, come into as common use as the bicycle' The literary Digest,1899. "While theoretically and technically television may oe feasible, commercially and financially I consider it an impossibility, a development of which we need waste little time dreaming." I.ee DeForest, 1926. Winter'88-'89 Page 3.