…most companies devote much more energy to optimizing what is there than to imagining what could be. We need to create constituencies for "What Could Be."

…in the long term the most important question for a company is not what you are but what you are becoming.

I don’t like scenario planning, because people don’t think out of the box. So scenario planning may focus on four, five, or six scenarios that you can envision, at the expense of others you can’t. Instead of looking at scenarios and forecasts, you should be looking to see how fragile your portfolio is. How vulnerable are you to model error? How vulnerable is your cash flow to changes in any parameter of your calculations? My idea is to base your navigation on fragility.

Wise men say, and not without reason, that whoever wishes to foresee the future must consult the past; for human events ever resemble those of preceding times. This arises from the fact that they are produced by men who have been, and ever will be, animated by the same passions and thus they must necessarily have the same results.

What makes economic forecasting so difficult is that, ultimately, it is a call on the behavior of people. It is the willingness or not of consumers to spend, executives to invest and create jobs, savers and money managers to buy stocks and bonds and so on that determines the direction of everything that matters about the economy. Unfortunately for the economic forecaster, behavior is driven by things like feelings, attitudes and fashions, things that can change on a dime. Confidence and fear are the big ones. When people are confident they behave in ways that tend to have good economic outcomes. Fear brings out the worst in us. That people can go from supreme confidence to blind fear and back seemingly instantly will always be the economic forecaster’s curse.

Some thoughts for executives on how to use an economic forecast: First, the economy involves myriad variables and interrelationships of varying measurability and complexity. Not every business depends for its prosperity on the same variables and relationships. Executives should know the key economic drivers of their business and focus on forecasting them. Having said that, economic growth is big for almost everyone; a rising tide does lift all boats.

Second, no economic forecast will ever get everything even close to right, so the wise executive focuses on directional tendencies and worst case/best case scenarios.

Third, not all economic forecasters are equal. Some actually do have better records than others. Executives should spend some time discerning who really is good at forecasting what matters to them.

Fourth, economic forecasters are not the only source of knowledge on where the economy is going. Statistics Canada, industry associations etc. compile data and do studies that can be very helpful. Within organizations, things like order books, customer intention surveys and supplier intelligence may provide hints on the future. Executives sometimes forget that their organization and its relationships can be a goldmine of information on the future.

The problem -- and the essence of what makes forecasting hard -- is that human nature is hardwired to abhor uncertainty. We are fascinated by change, but in our effort to avoid uncertainty we either dismiss outliers entirely or attempt to turn them into certainties that they are not.

If one is to properly understand events and to influence the future, it is essential to master four ways of looking at things: as they were, as they are, as they might become, and [most importantly] as they ought to be..

Scenarios are, in the end, simply a best guess at the future, tempered by informed judgment as to how trends may play out over time. The risk here is that it is very easy to believe the future that plays into our own set of biases. Compounding this is the absence of any way of predicting when discontinuities might logically occur or what their impact might be on the competitive environment.

My interest is in the future because I am going to spend the rest of my life there.

Possibility is only a word about bringing forth out of nothingness something we desire to become present, but possibility may be the most powerful word in our language because it enables us to visualize and strive for a future that is not available to us in the present. Possibility is like a time warp, allowing one to escape from the limits our past into an unshackled future.

Life is a series of collisions with the future; it is not the sum of what we have been, but what we yearn to be.

The human condition can almost be summed up in the observation that, whereas all experiences are of the past, all decisions are about the future. The image of the future, therefore, is the key to all choice-oriented behavior.

The best qualification of a prophet is to have a good memory.

The future is already here, it's just unevenly distributed.

Anyone who says businessmen deal in facts, not fiction, has never read five-year projections.

You can count the number of seeds in an apple, but you can't count the number of apples in a seed.

The information society is completed -- it's actually been around about 90 years. Now we're beginning the post-information society. In Alvin Toffler's terms, any time one of these new 'waves' comes in, like when the agricultural economy started giving way to the industrial economy, you have an 'epoch of uncertainty.' Now we're at a point where the uncertainty may never stabilize -- there is such a cascading of the amount of change with the rate of change. It isn't just about the acceleration of the pace of change. It's also the amount of it. The only certainty we can count on in the future will be a continuing state of uncertainty.

Every epoch has its organizing premise. When we were industrial, it was reason; when we were information, it was complexity, chaos theory, choice modeling...Now we think the new organizing premise is paradox.

So paradox becomes the organizing premise of the post-information society, just as complexity was the organizing premise of the information society. The key to paradox is that you don't do one or the other of those approaches; you do both.

The best way to predict the future is to create it.

Never mistake a clear view for a short distance.

Most people overestimate the effects of change in the short term, underestimate them in the long term and fail to spot where change will be greatest.

The best way to predict the future is to create it.