Jamais Cascio Quotes

A forecasting game is a kind of simulation, a kind of scenario, a kind of teleconference, a kind of artifact from the future - and more - that enlists the participants as 'first-person forecasters.'

The way that organizations and organisms anticipate the future is by taking signals from the past, most the time.

The key to making a good forecast is not in limiting yourself to quantitative information.

Most of us who work as professional futurists never really stop gathering information - you never know when a provocative, potentially disruptive new development might appear.

If you have to forecast, forecast often.

I have made good judgments in the past. I have made good judgments in the future.

I have been doing technology foresight for a number of years now on the level of scenario design, primarily. I want to become more rigorous with research methodology and statistical methods. I want to shift from creating clever SF scenarios to being a professional forecaster able to make rigorous predictions.

I am incredibly bad at predicting the future; I am only smart enough to observe the present and listen to my intuition about tendencies.

I'm a lousy predictor of the future.

Science has not yet mastered prophecy. We predict too much for the next year and yet far too little for the next 10.

Every good businessman or woman carefully analyzes all the available facts before making a decision.

I can't ever remember being struck by lightning when making a big decision. It's always about taking in more and more data points and making tack adjustments as you figure it out. I call customers, suppliers, industry analysts and try to get as much information as possible.

To be a good analyst, you need to know what the trends are and what teams are doing.

It's the business that you guys are in too. We try to get as much information as we can and make the best decisions that we can for the football team.

I've made mistakes before of doing different projects just based on my dreams, my hopes, my thing, and not really thinking about my customers.

Risk models are a substitute for historical knowledge, because they tend to work with just three years' worth of data. But three years is not a long time in financial history.

You need to carry out very careful pre-feasibility and feasibility studies before you enter any crisis situation.

You can build a statistical model and that's all well and good, but if you're dealing with a new type of financial instrument, for example, or a new type of situation - then the choices you're making are pretty arbitrary in a lot of respects.

I like to have fulsome discussions on every topic. What happens if you lose this show? What would you do? We have to look at every hypothesis.

I also believe that it is time to begin the fundamental analysis of how we got here, what led us here and what we need to do in order to ensure that we are equipped with the best possible intelligence as we face these issues in the future.

After all, the past is our only real guide to the future, and historical analogies are instruments for distilling and organizing the past and converting it to a map by which we can navigate.

I don't have a particular recommendation other than that we base decisions on as much hard data as possible. We need to carefully look at all the options and all their ramifications in making our decisions.

The fundamental work of investment management is filtering. The question is what do you filter.

My business is the analytical framework.

Many futurists use a checklist approach to make sure they're covering a sufficiently wide set of topics in terms of both research and brainstorming during a foresight exercise.