Open the Future: The Foresight Paradox

Jamais Cascio lays out the core paradox of futurism:

In every foresight or forecasting exercise, there are two overarching tensions:

• The more certain and detailed the forecast, the more people will accept it and believe it to be useful.
• The more certain and detailed the forecast, the less likely it is to happen.

This is the foresight paradox: you can be completely accurate, or you can be completely engaging, but you can’t be both. As a result, every forecast (or scenario, or prediction) has to find the right balance between the two, trading off likelihood for believability.

How to bridge this seeming divide? Cascio — like me and others — thinks the best solution is to contrive a set of scenarios, 3-5 for example, that frame some business issue or market direction.This comes with its own set of problems, such as the getting people to consider a ‘field’ of alterntiaves, and to gain some insight from that in a world crammed with other things to think about.

Specifically, Jamais points out that this approach is becoming increasingly impractical in conferences, given the recent trend toward very short presentations:

There seems to be a trend in conferences right now (especially in Europe) to limit presentations to 15 minutes. Although there are definite benefits to this approach (most notably in maintaining audience interest), it means that any foresight-based presentation is crippled. A speaker simply doesn’t have the time to offer multiple scenarios in anything other than a bullet point/headline format, surrounded by lots of big idea framing to give the scenario headlines some context (the talk I gave at the Guardian Activate Summit in London last year is probably my best effort at doing this).

Unfortunately, audiences don’t respond as well to multiple scenarios as they do to single, detailed forecasts, even when they know the detailed forecasts will inevitably be wrong. Moreover, appearances limited by time (such as, in particular, television) make even the headline scenario approach difficult. The best one can do — in my experience, at least, and I’d love to hear better suggestions — is to be sure to offer caveats and use cautious language such as “appears to,” “likely,” and especially “one possibility” (or similar statements underlining that different outcomes are possible).

The modern spectacle-driven media loathes uncertainty, and will almost always give more attention to aggressive certitude (no matter the accuracy) than caution. Many business audiences feel the same way. Sadly, the foresight paradox boils down to this:

The futurists who get the most attention are usually the least accurate.

Snap.

(Source: underpaidgenius)