Quick Stakeholder Forecasting

Of the many conversations I had yesterday, all of which were quite useful, one was particularly productive with regard to the Infinite Economy.  One of the things to emerge from this particular conversation was a conceptual tool for some quick forecasting.

What you see often in the media, and what most of us are guilty of on a regular basis, is extrapolating the development of a technology or issue with all other things remaining equal.  This is, as I've mentioned previously, a natural but uncritical method of forecasting.  Nothing, in fact, exists in isolation, and most phenomena in which we are interested in fact co-evolve with a great many other phenomena.

But as we were discussing this truth yesterday in the context of forecasting elements of the Infinite Economy (and props to Mr. +Dominic Muren for helping shape said conversation and all of our resulting conclusions), we began applying some structure to our conversation and came up with method/heuristic for quickly challenging our forecast.  In fact, this method looks promising as a simple tool for groups to produce forecasts within larger processes (e.g. scenario planning).

Essentially, this is a heuristic that runs through a set of common stakeholders to either produce a forecast or modify (test) a forecast that someone is suggesting.  The stakeholders we identified include:

1. Physicist
2. Engineer
3. Lawyer
4. Business person/investor
5. Cultural anthropologist/ethnographer

So, given a forecast that someone has suggested (and let's think about a technological forecast for this, just for ease of imagining), we would:

First, consider whether or not a physicist would say that the suggested forecast is prohibited according to our current understanding of the laws of physics/the universe.

Second, given a physicist saying that it's possible, we consider whether or not an engineer could identify current or experimental tools/process to make the forecast real.

Third, given an engineer saying that they could imagine how the developments would be produced, we would consider what a lawyer would see in terms of enabling/constraining laws and how laws might be used in support of or reaction to the developments being forecast.

Fourth, given the lawyer's comments on the broader societal reactions and how that might affect a development pathway, consider what a business person or investor would say about pursuing the developments in the forecast.

And finally, given what results so far, what would a cultural anthropologist say about how the suggested developments would or would not fit within people's lives.

As I said, a quick tool, but one that I think could be very useful for wind tunneling or stress testing (or at least assumption-testing) many of the extrapolative forecasts that people produce everyday.