Better decisions in uncertain times - McKinsey Quarterly

McKinsey Quarterly has an article “Dynamic management: Better decisions in uncertain times” (signup required) which tackles the holy grail, the veritable raison d'etre of foresight work: how to make better decisions under conditions of uncertainty.

Highlights:

• Learning by doing – Use techniques such as scenario planning, or 'stage-gating' to stoke new think about the future.
• Create workshop-based adult-learning techniques – Manage ambiguity and complexity by developing case studies to surface and debate alternative courses of actions.
• Change how decisions are made – Redesign decision making processes to enable rapid surfacing and formal designation of issues considered critical.
• Rethinking corporate budgeting processes – to make it more flexible and specifically allow for range of outcomes.

The tagline wisdom: 'Companies can’t predict the future, but they can build organizations that will survive and flourish under just about any possible future.'
That's the holy grail. Easier said than done, but these practices and techniques are the basis, and certainly 'a million percent' better than calculating the future on an Excel spreadsheet, using a moving average, if you know what I mean.