Forecasting and Foresight

3 Credits · Level: Graduate

Uncertainty increasingly dominates individual, organizational, and national decision-making. Rarely has the future seemed less clear, yet national-security practitioners must nevertheless make high-stakes, difficult-to-reverse choices—that is, they must formulate strategy for the future amid the onslaught of the present. This course teaches students how to manage uncertainty by introducing both forecasting (probabilistic prediction of the future) and foresight (structured imagination of multiple plausible futures), thereby covering both quantitative and qualitative approaches to anticipating the future. This course is part lecture/discussion and part practicum. It will chronicle the evolving understanding of future-thinking over the past century; it will examine the philosophical and psychological bases of forecasting and foresight; and it will draw on case studies to ground those discussions in real-world contexts. The course will also provide students with tools for thinking about the future in order to better navigate the present. They will learn how to improve their ability to forecast geopolitical developments and how to practice widely used foresight techniques, such as scenario planning, that leverage imagination to create a dynamic mental map of the rapidly changing geopolitical environment.