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” 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.
Learning Objectives
• Making Predictions
• Becoming a Great Predictor
• Creating Great Projections and Budgets
Major Topics
• Why great predictions are not intuitive
• How to separate correlation from causation
• How to recognize and overcome bias
• 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
