Robert J. Sawyer Quotes

Foresight is not about predicting the future, it's about minimizing surprise.

The real trick in life is to turn hindsight into foresight that reveals insight.

How do Ferrari know what I'm doing next year when I don't know what I'm doing next week?

It is far better to foresee even without certainty than not to foresee at all.

Planning is bringing the future into the present so that you can do something about it now.

No sensible decision can be made any longer without taking into account not only the world as it is, but the world as it will be.

Remember, the goal of structured futures thinking is to come up with a picture of possible futures that will help to inform strategic decisions.

Plan backwards as well as forward. Set objectives and trace back to see how to achieve them. You may find that no path can get you there. Plan forward to see where your steps will take you, which may not be clear or intuitive.

I must analyze, from what I do now, what will be the impact two or three or five years in the future. What is the statement I want to make?

At a very young age I was predicting outcomes, trying to take all the information and find the best route to wherever I was going. I avoided a lot of pitfalls because of that.

I always say that my job is not to think about today. My job is to look around the corner and feel and see what's coming, and then warn everybody else.

I'm always good at seeing five, ten steps ahead. Like, really thinking ahead, you know? Reverse engineering, whatever it is, you know.

I think it's really important to have a long-term perspective.

You can't make good decisions without knowing the business.

Leadership is about making decisions with the information you have, not the information people will have 12 years later, i kind of feel sorry for my friend Jeb Bush.

We need to be able to answer not yesterday's challenges but to tomorrow's challenges.

People who are great at making decisions in the face of uncertainty have great judgment.

The one characteristic more essential than any other is foresight... It should be the growing nation with a future which takes the long look ahead.

If you do not design the future, someone or something else will design it for you.

I know I made plenty of mistakes in my tenure. But one of the things that you learn is to be very careful and to protect yourself down the road a little bit, which is to say you've got to think ahead and think where is the story going to go? What are all the possible outcomes? And how do I protect the president from unexpected twists and turns in the road?

It's all well and good to look back after the fact and see what we should have done, but we rarely know what path is best when we take that first step.

Prudence is a presumption of the future, contracted from the experience of time past.

It is the very essence of intelligence to coordinate means with a view to a remote end, and to undertake what it does not feel absolutely sure of carrying out.

The man of action has the present, but the thinker controls the future.

To deal with future we have to deal with possibilities. Analysis will only tell us what is.