Future Savvy

There's no shortage of predictions available to organizations looking to anticipate and profit from future trends. Apparently helpful forecasts are ubiquitous in everyday communications such as newspapers and business magazines, and in specialized sources such as government and think-tank forecasts, consultant reports, and stock-market guides. These resources are crucial but they are also of very mixed quality. While everyone knows a future-focus is crucial for strategic vision and organizational readiness, what information from the endless sea of sources is valid? How do you know which predictions to take seriously, which to be wary of, and which to throw out entirely? Which ones do you let guide your decisions? Future Savvy provides a hands-on approach to judging predictive material of all types, including providing a battery of critical tests to apply to any forecast to assess its validity, and judge how to fit it into everyday management thinking. In a colorful book with many examples, Adam Gordon synthesizes information assessment skills and future studies tools into a single template that allows managers to apply systematic "forecast filtering" to reveal strengths and weakness in the predictions they face. The better leaders' view of the future, the better their decisions - and successes - will be. Future Savvy empowers both business and policy/government decision-makers to use forecasts wisely and so improve their judgment in anticipating opportunities, avoiding threats, and managing uncertainty.

ISBN 0814409121   Pages 294 ISBN13 9780814409121 (What's this?)   Volumes 1 Publisher Amacom   Weight (grammes) 586 Imprint Amacom   Published in New York Format Hardback   Height (mm) 236 Publication date 01 Sep 2008   Width (mm) 160 Library of Congress 2008021606   Spine width (mm) 31 DEWEY 658.4012   Academic level Professional / Scholarly DEWEY edition DC22   Interest age 17

		Introduction		1
Ch. 1		Recognizing Forecast Intentions		17
Ch. 2		The Quality of Information: How Good Is the Data?		39
Ch. 3		Bias Traps: How and Why Interpretations Are Spun		61
Ch. 4		Zeitgeist and Perception: How We Can't Escape Our Own Mind		83
Ch. 5		The Power of User Utility: How Consumers Drive and Block Change		105
Ch. 6		Drivers, Blockers, and Trends		133
Ch. 7		The Limits of Quantitative Forecasting		153
Ch. 8		A Systems Perspective in Forecasting		173
Ch. 9		Alternative Futures: How It's Better to Be Vaguely Right than Exactly Wrong		197
Ch. 10		Applying Forecast Filtering		215
Ch. 11		Questions to Ask of Any Forecast		263
		Further Reading		285
		Index		289

."..Gordon's book will be a useful primer and refresher on the art of proper forecasting and on detecting the artifice and subtlety of persuasion via anticipatory declaration." --"Research Technology Management"

Future Savvy was the most stimulating futures book I read this year (2009). I was put off at first; it sets itself up as a book about forecasting, and I am sceptical about this (you learn early in futures work that all forecasts are wrong, except for the ones which are right for the wrong reasons). But businesses and governments live by forecasts, and as you go further in, you discover that Adam Gordons intent is to make us appreciate the limits of forecasting.<br><br>There are good chapters on the nature of bias (social and personal), on why technology-led forecasts are so often wrong, and a reminder that the blockers of change can be as influential as the drivers of change. Unlike some futures books, it is also clear and well-written.<br><br>It ends with a couple of chapters which are designed to improve the quality of our thinking about the future. The first takes some actual forecasts and interrogates their assumptions and gaps. (The forecast for the US housing market to 2013 by the US Homeownership Alliance is self-serving and spectacularly wrong). The second has a useful set of questions the reader can use to test the value of a forecast. As he concludes,<br><br> 'Good forecasting is as much about seeing what wont change in the future. Even in fast-moving situations, not everything will change.'<br><br>Fron The Futures Company blog: http://blog.thefuturescompany.com/ - Andrew Curry



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