Six Rules for Effective Forecasting

Saffo, a long-time futurist at the Institute for the Future, reduces forecasting to six rules that most planners violate: define a cone of uncertainty rather than a single prediction, look for the S-curve, embrace the things that don't fit, hold strong opinions weakly, look back twice as far as you look forward, know when not to make a forecast. The rules sound obvious; the paper's value is the examples of where each is routinely broken. For product direction the piece is a short training in a skill that is rarely taught: thinking about the future as a distribution rather than a point estimate. Read alongside Duke for the decision-theoretic complement — Saffo gives you the shape of the question, Duke gives you what to do with the answer.