CIA-Funded Research showed Expressing Probabilities Helps Measure Foresight & Improve it Radically

Research

View above about Model Issue: Value of Quantifying Stories in Scenarios

Imagine that you could dramatically improve your firm’s forecasting ability, but to do so you’d have to expose just how unreliable its predictions—and the people making them—really are. That’s exactly what the U.S. intelligence community did, with dramatic results. Back in October 2002, the National Intelligence Council issued its official opinion that Iraq possessed chemical and biological weapons and was actively producing more weapons of mass destruction. Of course, that judgment proved colossally wrong. Shaken by its intelligence failure, the $50 billion bureaucracy set out to determine how it could do better in the future, realizing that the process might reveal glaring organizational deficiencies.