Uncharted

But the time horizon for accurate forecasts is dauntingly small: the Good Judgment Project found that, while many forecasters were accurate within only about 150 days, its own super-forecasters weren’t confident beyond 400 days.

Soft data (cultural differences in different markets, for example) is as important as hard data. Scenarios should focus less on predicting outcomes and more on illuminating the forces at work across the organisation and the environments in which it operates. They must be relevant and challenging, pragmatic not ideological.

he had always operated on the basis that anything could end tomorrow. So he lived on his salary, never spending his bonus. That kept him focused on what was at stake – the bank itself, not his own personal financial security.

In an age of uncertainty and change, being able to sense what to do in advance of reliable prediction could make businesses or non-profits smarter, more inventive and more relevant. Sense-making, the intuition for change and capacity to pursue it energetically is what markets applauded in Steve Jobs, a man who wasn’t an artist but thought like one.

This is known as the automation paradox: the skills you automate, you lose. So the more we depend on machines to think for us, the less good we become at thinking for ourselves. The fewer decisions we make, the less good we become at making them. We risk falling into a trap: more need for certainty, more dependency on technology; less skill, more n

The future isn’t something to be nailed down, defined and programmed. The only way to influence it is to keep noticing. While an efficient mindset prizes predictability and continuity, an artist’s passion for exploration develops the capacity for change.

Plummer is making a provocative and important point: that what matters most isn’t the predictions themselves but how we respond to them, and whether we respond to them at all.

One of the great insights from scenario planning has been that the act of doing it can change the systems it strives to describe.

Maguire, who by now is a huge fan of memory, was at pains to point out that the fluidity of our memory isn’t always negative. It allows us to be more flexible, adaptable and creative in our thinking.