Paul Saffo is another guy. His thing is technology forecasting. He also has a wikipedia page.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Saffo
He wrote an article, Six Rules for Effective Forecasting, published in HBR.
Here is the URLs:
https://hbr.org/2007/07/six-rules-for-effective-forecasting
“The goal of forecasting is not to predict the future but to tell you what you need to know to take meaningful action in the present.”
you can use your 2 free articles for the month to read it or look for it (Six Rules for Effective Forecasting) some where else. A pdf version of (Six Rules for Effective Forecasting) should be around somewhere on the InterNet. I read the article. It was helpful, useful, and gave me mental tools on how to think about forecasting.
By Paul Saffo
“Six Rules for Effective Forecasting”,
Harvard Business Review article
One must look for the turns, not the straightways, and thus one must peer far enough into the past to identify patterns.
... one must peer far enough into the past to identify patterns.
Rule 5 : Look back twice as far as you look forward
The following is my note summary from his youtube video, Paul Saffo: Never Mistake a Clear View for a Short Distance:
(1) Large mega-trend is usually invisible, too big to see the big picture; for example, generally, there is a 40 to 60 years cycle of demographic shift in aging population. It is difficult to see the forest, if you are a bird, living in a tree. [air pollution (dirty air) effects on public health]
(2) very tiny signal at the inflection point is also usually invisible, it is too small to notice, you would need instrumentation, tools, measurement, record keeping, plotting the data points on a graph paper, to look at the pattern over time to tease out the inflection point. And even if we see the inflection point, the importance of the inflection point might not be obvious until nearly five to seven years later. Like for example, the form (or type) of cancer for a person of interest, the inflection point might not show up and become detectable until nearly 30 years later; at the opposite end, the inflection point of autism spectrum disorder, in young children, shows up rather early; notice that I am unable to address the root cause of the inflection point. The ability to look at the data point as one whole pattern over time can be useful. Inflection point is also refer to as tipping point, threshold, and other labels.
(3) constant is invisible, constant is notice only if it changes, for example in the Western developed countries like the United States, including Japan, electrical power is assume to be there 24/7; electricity is constant. Another example, garbage collection happens once every week; this is constant and, mostly taken for granted. [air pollution (dirty air) effects on public health]
“constant is notice only if it changes, constant is invisible”
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Gerald M. & Daniela Weinberg, General principles of systems design, 1988 [ ]
p.330
many more “invisible” mechanism are simple built into the norms of behavior in society. Such norms usually remain invisible unless and until specific revolutionary acts make them conspicuous, so that their existence may no longer be denied. Who knows how many society's mechanism incorporate the automobile until there is rationing of gasoline? Who imagines the influence of television on birth rate until there is a power failure?
(General Principles of Systems Design, Gerald M. Weinberg, Daniela Weinberg, formerly titled On the Design of Stable Systems, May 1979, p.330)
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Paul Saffo: Never Mistake a Clear View for a Short Distance
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8NrFDocBF0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8NrFDocBF0
Published on Dec 6, 2013
(20:10)
san andreas fault, 2-inches of movement per year, as pressure built up, an earthquake is inevitable, the question is when;
the pressure are building over time;
things go non-linear at the inflection point;
identifying the inflection;
innovation is generally good news, it can be disruptive to business model;
most ideas take 20 year to become an overnight success;
1947-1968: 21 years;
look for underlying driving forces;
3 kind of driving forces: constants, cycles (repeated pattern), and novelties;
constant is notice only if it changes, constant is invisible;
sun spot cycle;
Kondratiev wave, about a 50 year cycle,
prosperity → recession → depression → improvement (Kondratiev wave, about a 50 year cycle);
2 kinds of novelties: novelty so small that you overlook them, so big;
example of so big: humanity became a majority urban dweller;
a single drive force rarely determine outcome;
cherish failures, especially someone elses;
alpha is being the first to identify inflection point and turn it into strategy;
embrace uncertainty;
we like [the] things [that we like and to our benefit] to stay the same.
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→ why it is important to have some understanding of forecasting
→ look for underlying driving forces;
→ 3 kind of driving forces: constants, cycles (repeated pattern), and novelties;
→ a single drive force rarely determine outcome;
→ Because I don't know what lies behind something, I cann't keep up, and at something of a disadvantage. And that's no way to live. To be uninformed and entirely at someone else's mercy. (Netflix streaming show, The Queen, first season)
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By Paul Saffo
“Six Rules for Effective Forecasting”,
Harvard Business Review article, July-August 2007
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futurist Roy Amara
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The entire portion of the S curve to the left of the inflection point is paved with indicators──subtle pointers that when aggregated become powerful hints of things to come. The best way for forecasters to spot an emerging S curve is to become attuned to things that don't fit, things people can't classify or will even reject. Because of your dislike of uncertainty and our preoccupation with the present, we tend to ignore indicators that don't fit into familiar boxes. But by definition anything that is truly new won't fit into a category that already exists.
... ... ...
More often than not, indicators look like mere oddball curiosities or, worse, failures, and just as we dislike uncertainty, we shy away from failures and anomalies. But if you want to look for the thing that's going to come whistling in out of nowhere in the next years and change your business, look for interesting failures──smart ideas that seem to have gone nowhere.
... ... ...
The essential difference between the two skippers' responses was that the Delphy's skipper ignored evidence that invalidated his dead-reckoning information and narrowed his cone of uncertainty at the very moment when the data was screaming out to broaden it. In constrast, the Kennedy's skipper listened to the multiple sources of conflicting weak information and concluded that his ship's position was much less certain than assumed. He hedged their bets and, therefore, saved the ship.
In forecasting, as in navigation, lots of interlocking weak information is vastly more trustworthy than a point or two of strong information. The problem is that traditional research habits are based on collecting strong information. And once researchers have gone through the long process of developing a beautiful hypothesis, they have a tendency to ignore any evidence that contradicts their conclusion.
... ... ...
Thomas Kuhn
The structure of scientific revolutions.
Thomas Kuhn's nonlinear process of paradigm shifts
Once a theory gains wide acceptance, there follows a long stable period in which the theory remains accepted wisdom. All the while, however, contradictory evidence is quietly building that eventually results in a sudden shift.
... ... ...
Good forecasting is the reverse: It is a process of strong opinions, weakly held. If you must forecast, then forecast often──and be the first one to prove yourself wrong. The way to do this is to form a forecast as quickly as possible and then set out to discredit it with new data.
... ... ...
By formulating a sequence of failed forecasts as rapidly as possible, you can steadily refine the cone of uncertainty to a point where you can comfortably base a strategic response on the forecast contained within its boundaries. Having strong opinions gives you the capacity to reach conclusions quickly, but holding them weakly allows you to discard them the moment you encounter conflicting evidence.
... ... ...
One must look for the turns, not the straightways, and thus one must peer far enough into the past to identify patterns.
... one must peer far enough into the past to identify patterns.
Rule 5 : Look back twice as far as you look forward
... ... ...
It all seems to defy categorization, much less prediction, until one looks back five decades [50 years] to the emergence in the early 1950s of TV and the subsequent mass-media order it helped catalyze. The present moment has eerie parallels to that era, and inspection of those similarities quickly brings today's landscape into sharp focus: We are in a moment when the old mass-media order is being replaced by a new personal-media order, and it's not just the traditional media players that are struggling to adjust. The cutting-edge players of the information revolution, from Microsoft to Google, are pedaling every bit as hard.
... ... ...
source: HBR six rules for effective forecasting.pdf
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http://longnow.org/seminars/02008/jan/11/embracing-uncertainty-the-secret-to-effective-forecasting/
Paul Saffo is a forecaster with over two decades experience exploring the dynamics of large-scale, long-term change.
"Some would argue that forecasting is a dangerous exercise in futility, but they are mistaken. In fact, effective forecasting is not merely possible, but remarkably easy; all it takes is simple shift in perspective and a few common-sense heuristics." The most quoted futurist alive, Paul Saffo specializes in the history and future of technology. In a recent article in the Harvard Business Review he spelled out the secrets of his trade, which he will expand on in this talk. Saffo is a member of the board of The Long Now Foundation.
Rules of Forecasting
Reflecting on his 25 years as a forecaster, Paul Saffo pointed out that a forecaster’s job is not to predict outcomes, but to map the “cone of uncertainty” on a subject. Where are the edges of what might happen? (Uncertainty is cone-shaped because it expands as you project further into the future— next decade has more surprises in store than next week.)
[Rule]: Wild cards sensitize us to surprise, and they push the edges of the cone out further. You can call weird imaginings a wild card and not be ridiculed. Science fiction is brilliant at this, and often predictive, because it plants idea bombs in teenagers, which they make real 15 years later.
[Rule]: Change is never linear. Our expectations are linear, but new technologies come in “S” curves, so we routinely overestimate short-term change and underestimate long-term change. “Never mistake a clear view for a short distance.”
“Inflection points are tiptoeing past us all the time.” He saw one at the DARPA Grand Challenge race for robot cars in the Mojave Desert in 2004 and 2005. In 2004 no cars finished the race, and only four got off the starting line. In 2005, all 23 cars started and five finished.
[Rule]: Look for indicators- things that don’t fit. At the same time the robot cars were triumphing in the desert, 108 human-driven cars piled into one another in the fog on a nearby freeway. A survey of owners of Roomba robot vacuum cleaners showed that 2/3 of owners give the machine a personal name, and 1/3 take it with them on vacations.
[Rule]: Look back twice as far. Every decade lately there’s a new technology that sets the landscape. In the 1980s, microprocessors made a processing decade that culminated in personal computers. In the 1990s it was the laser that made for communication bandwidth and an access decade culminating in the World Wide Web. In the 2000s cheap sensors are making an interaction decade culminating in a robot takeoff. The Web will soon be made largely of machines communicating with each other.
[Rule]: Cherish failure. Preferably other people’s. We fail our way into the future. Silicon Valley is brilliant at this. Since new technologies take 20 years to have an overnight success, for an easy win look for a field that has been failing for 20 years and build on that.
[Rule]: Be indifferent. Don’t confuse the desired with the likely. Christian end-time enthusiasts have been wrong for 2,000 years.
[Rule]: Assume you are wrong. And forecast often.
[Rule]: Embrace uncertainty.
Saffo ended with a photo he took of a jar by the cash register in a coffee shop in San Francisco. The handwritten note on the jar read, “If you fear change, leave it in here.”
PS… You can find different rules and a more strait-laced presentation by Saffo in his Harvard Business Review article, “Six Rules for Effective Forecasting,” here. --Stewart Brand
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