Predicting the Future

Overview

We all make predictions in our personal and professional lives. We base our decisions to marry, buy a house, launch a new product or hire staff on expectations about the future. How can we use best practices and current research to improve our ability to predict the future?

The course material includes eight group discussions and case studies.

Highlights

Making Predictions

• Why great predictions are not intuitive?
• How to separate correlation from causation?
• How to recognize and overcome bias?
• Who is Thomas Bayes and why he matters?

• Why the ability to doubt helps?
• Why it is better to be a fox than a hedgehog?
• How non-conformists change the world
• Learn from the past without hindsight bias

• Why the many purposes and types of budgets and projections cause distortions?
• How benchmarking and metrics have changed the budget process?

• What is Black Swan risk?
• Why the risk you don’t know can hurt you?
• Protect your company from unknowable risks

Prerequisites

Participants should have at least six months of industry or public experience and a thorough knowledge of financial accounting principles and practices. Management experience will be helpful.

Designed For

This seminar is for those who prepare, review, evaluate and use budgets and projections.

Objectives

We will examine current best practices in forecasting to help us prepare better budgets and projections. We will also examine budgeting pitfalls and ways to avoid budget traps. We will discuss the risks that cause actual results to vary from our predictions and discuss methods to deal with both known and unknown risks.