Global Prescience Research Initiative

Strategic decision making is a complex, yet critically important process for any enterprise. It requires a clear understanding of the extant situation, but more than that, it also requires a judicious forecast of the future, and therein lays the problem. The likelihood of making accurate predictions diminishes as a function of time into the future. Strategic planners, therefore, have the choice of either making long term predictions with low confidence – which is unacceptable in business and other environments – or limiting their predictions to the short term to ensure a higher degree of confidence. Given the general tendency to avert and minimize risk, especially among corporate managers, this tendency to restrict forecasting to short timeframes severely limits longer term strategic planning.

Imagine the change one could produce in such planning, if one could apprehend the onset of small trends and changes, early and predict with a much higher degree of confidence the likely course of their development, dynamics and impact. Having such capability would necessarily extend the window for forecasting deeper into the future with obvious benefits for planning. Ideally, the development of this kind of forecasting, called global prescience (i.e., past, present and future situational awareness), will require an unprecedented level of real-time, dynamic, and context specific information gathering from all sources on emerging tendencies that will lead to critical change and which could develop into a mega-trend with real impact.