Improved Forecasting through a Different Focus

Dr. Guntram Werther

We are somewhat barking up the wrong tree with our heavy emphasis on getting ever more information and hoping that better technical methods will solve existing futures, especially crisis emergence, assessment shortfalls.

The core issue in fostering improved human understanding about both emerging normal and crisis change is learning to better use the assessment tools at hand rather than constantly thinking that some next new method or data improvement will solve insight and foresight problems. There are things to be achieved in terms of cognition, method usage, and using concepts like entanglement and embeddedness to enhance performance.

Three interconnected sub-themes will be addressed from prize-winning work in each area to attack the 'big issue' of how we get better now:

1) Using existing information and assessment approaches more effectively to understand emerging futures. In short, understanding what excellence at judging 'normal' change looks like.
2) Using insights about the dynamics of assessment failure that enfold mainstream analysts and organizations pre-crisis so as to better foresee and time an emerging crisis (Using their failure to comparative advantage), and
3) Looking at how post crisis one can better foresee how/why different societies recover - bounce back - in their particular way.

Let's explore how the scientific community needs to improve human practice regarding change assessment and futures forecasting?

Guntram Werther is Professor of Strategic Management at Temple University's Fox School of Business and formerly Executive in Residence/Adjunct Professor at Thunderbird: The School of Global Management and Senior Research Fellow at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence's Proteus Futures Group. Dr. Werther's doctorate is from Washington University in St. Louis (1990), with his dissertation being twice nominated best comparative work in the USA (1991/1992). Dr. Werther was the 2007 winner of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence's Proteus Futures International Competition, and the 2012 winner of the Society of Actuaries' national competition on Extreme Event Recognition, Assessment and Management. His socio-psychologically grounded approach to holistic assessment of global change and to understanding specific country styles of change was featured in 2008 at the ODNI's Intelligence Community Center for Academic Excellence. The Proteus Futures Group (ODNI) Executive Director termed Dr. Werther's work "unequaled" (2008) while in 2009 the Proteus Program Manager said: "I believe that he is the leading practitioner in holistically forecasting future trends."

Examples of some of Dr. Werther's recent work:

• An overview of Black Swans can be found at: Herget, Thomas. Are Black Swans Real? (April-May 2013.)
• There is a co-directed (with Dr. Reuven Gal, National Security Council of Israel) special forum on societal resilience that may be of interest (the intelligence foresight uses of profiling country-specific resilience style)