Thinking About the Future: An Introduction to Forecasting

From the third chapter of "Thinking about the Future," a book co-edited by Social Technologies' Andy Hines and futurist Peter Bishop, comes this Introduction to Forecasting.
Forecasting involves creating alternative futures. Most organizations, if not challenged, tend to believe the future is going to be pretty much like the past. If the analyst probes at an organization's view of the future, he or she will find an array of unexamined assumptions, which tend to converge around incremental changes--a.k.a. the "official future" or "baseline forecast"--that pretty much preserves the current paradigm or way of doing things. A key task for the analyst, therefore, is to challenge this view and prod the organization to take seriously the possibility that things may not continue as they have--in practice, they rarely do!
In essence, forecasting involves generating the widest range of creative possibilities, then consolidating and prioritizing the most useful for the organization to actively consider or prepare for as it moves forward.
A principal means of challenging the official future is to develop alternative futures. A key tenet of strategic foresight is that the future is inherently unknowable and efforts to get it exactly right are futile. What the analyst can offer is to expand the range and depth of possibilities for the organization to consider, thereby reducing the likelihood and magnitude of surprise. This in turn enables the organization to successfully navigate through what does emerge. The analyst may be asked to produce the "correct" future, that is, to predict what will happen. Organizations prefer the clarity of dealing with a single possibility rather than the messiness of alternatives. In response, the analyst must get across the idea that single-point forecasting is doomed and the organization will be better served by understanding and preparing for a range of possibilities.
Forecasting alternative futures does not mean developing detailed plans for every contingency, however. Rather it means monitoring the external environment for leading indicators--signs or guideposts that suggest events are heading towards one or more of the alternatives.
The guidelines in this section suggest how the organization can produce a useful set of alternative futures. A useful forecast challenges existing assumptions about the future, gets the organization to consider "what if," and thereby motivates it to plan and act differently. An alternative future that turns out to be off-base can still be useful if it has prompted the organization to take the future seriously, to consider and prepare for possibilities in a way that yields helpful learning and experience.
The preparatory work done in Framing begins to pay dividends here, incidentally. If Framing has helped the team function well, produced a work environment that is conducive to creativity, and so forth, the work done in Forecasting will be that much better.