Future Savvy: Identifying Trends to Make Better Decisions, Manage Uncertainty, and Profit from Change [9781400232543]

Overview

There is no shortage of forecasting available to businesses looking to anticipate and profit from future trends. But 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? Most important, which ones do you let guide your business’s decisions?

Future Savvy gives you a battery of critical tests to apply to any forecast to assess its validity and its relevance to your business’s strategic decisions. In sifting through the endless reams of information you receive in the form of predictions, you will now be able to:

• Distinguish between (and apply) future-aligning versus future-influencing forecasting
• Combine short, medium, and long-term forecasting to create a three-dimensional model of the future
• Decrease reliance on “hard” data that may not be as inarguable as you think
• See through biases in research, consider the source and motivation behind any analysis, and approach information from the perspective most relevant to your organization’s needs
• Assess the value of forecasting as it pertains to the nature and timing of specific outcomes
• Avoid the common pitfalls in trend-based forecasting and use better alternatives
• Develop multiple future scenarios
• And more

Author Adam Gordon synthesizes all these powerful analytical tools into a template that allows you to apply forecast filtering, a systematic deconstruction that accounts for all possible sources of inconsistency, fallibility, or bias in any presentation of predictive information. Using the approaches in Future Savvy, you stand a much better chance of parlaying information into strong results.