The Book Report: Superforecasting

Jerry McLaughlin is a seasoned entrepreneur who reads a lot of books useful to business leaders. Periodically, he’ll share his thoughts about a book that really stood out. This month, Jerry explores “Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction” by Philip Tetlock and Dan Gardner.

What is this book about?

This is the true story of ‘ordinary’ people consistently making thousands of better forecasts than experts over a five-year period and how they did it. The authors called this effort the Good Judgment Project and showed that non-expert forecasts could be combined in ways that better predicted the likelihood of future events than the best forecasts of even CIA experts, consistently.

Why you care about this book

It includes techniques to make you a better forecaster (and decision-maker) and helps you think about how to organize your teams to increase forecast accuracy beyond what experts can do.
Maybe, for example, you’d like a more accurate estimate of how long a project will take or the likelihood that customers will buy a new product. You may be able to get more accurate answers from your team to these types of forecasting questions by adopting some of the practices and techniques described in this book.

This book in 50 words

Tetlock recently completed a five-year project for the U.S. intelligence community to improve the forecasting of events. He found that some people are much better at this than others and that, by combining individual estimates in a specific way, he could create even more accurate estimates. He also identified a number of techniques anyone can use to improve their own forecasting accuracy.

Key learnings

Before estimating your chance of success in any effort, find out what the general rate of success is for that activity. For example, before deciding that your new product can’t miss, note the percentage of all new product introductions fail.
Then make your estimate of your own probability of success. If you begin with the average rate of success and then adjusting it to fit your situation, you will make a more accurate forecast than if you do not first consider the average rate of success.
Keep a record of what you thought the odds of success were at the time you make your decisions. After the event has passed, look at those notes and see whether you were thinking about the right factors and gave proper weight to those factors. In this way, you give yourself feedback on your own decision-making process. This is a form of deliberate practice that will improve your decision-making.