The Art of Forecasting: See what's next using the best information

Attention intelligence professionals in the Philadelphia/Delaware/Brandywine Valley area:

This year, Eric Garland and Competitive Futures are celebrating the end of the anxiety-producing past 18 months of financial and geopolitical shenanigans. 2008 and 2009 were years of theater of the absurd, courtesy of our largest and least-observant institutions, which threatened to burn down and fall over on us, supposedly taking our retirements, business models, hard currency, favorite DVDs, food supply, pets, profits, and self-esteem with them.

It’s 2010. The large institutions are still falling over, albeit more slowly, letting you and everyone else reflect a bit on what to do next. But where will you get information? The media, themselves members of large, nearly-extinct companies with obsolete business models, are desperately trying to get you to go back to “normal,” which is funny, since those norms made everything blow up last year. To accomplish this, they are feeding you wishful thinking dressed up as forecasts to convince you of a return to this comfortable, late-1990s way of doing things. You have to base your view of the future on:

• Sunny economic forecasts based on stock speculation instead of shrinking incomes and unemployment
• Chairmen of the Federal Reserve forecasting the rise housing prices just before the detonation of the entire economy under the weight of fake mortage-backed securities
• The US Government predicting world oil supply as stable or steadily growing while key oil fields go extinct and China and India put millions of cars on the road
• Healthcare debates that appear to ignore the impact of the Boomer retirement, shifts in employment contracts, and broad public health trends
• Despite this nonsense, you still need to know about the future in order to make your business strategies. Some questions for you:
  
  
  
• How will you know good forecasts from bad?
• Who can you trust in a world without authority figures?
• How will you make critical decisions about your business, your career, your family, your life?
• One way to get around the pabulum masquerading as news is to develop professional-level skills for identifying trends and evaluating forecasts so you can make your own view of the future AND interpret it for your own needs.
  
  Based on our expertise evaluating expert forecasts for corporations and world-leaders for more than a decade, and now teach executives from hundreds of such organizations how to analyze world events for themselves, we will teach you how to:
  
  
• Find the right sources
• Identify what type of forecast is on offer
• Explore the assumptions of the author
• Pick out the trends used to make the forecast
• Identify implications of the forecast
• Assess the probability of the future described
• Communicate this infomation to other people
• At the end of the day, you’ll be able to:
  
  
  
• Make more informed decisions, more coherent strategies
• Show leadership in the workplace
• Plan your retirement with more confidence
• Choose a future job path
• Enjoy thinking about the future