Dan Gardner

Everyone would benefit from seeing further into the future, whether buying stocks, crafting policy, launching a new product, or simply planning the week’s meals. Unfortunately, people tend to be terrible forecasters. As Wharton professor Philip Tetlock showed in a landmark 2005 study, even experts’ predictions are only slightly better than chance. However, an important and underreported conclusion of that study was that some experts do have real foresight, and Tetlock has spent the past decade trying to figure out why. What makes some people so good? And can this talent be taught? In Superforecasting, Tetlock and coauthor Dan Gardner offer a masterwork on prediction, drawing on decades of research and the results of a massive, government-funded forecasting tournament. The Good Judgment Project involves tens of thousands of ordinary people—including a Brooklyn filmmaker, a retired pipe installer, and a former ballroom dancer—who set out to forecast global events. Some of the volunteers have turned out to be astonishingly good. They’ve beaten other benchmarks, competitors, and prediction markets. They’ve even beaten the collective judgment of intelligence analysts with access to classified information. They are "superforecasters." In this groundbreaking and accessible book, Tetlock and Gardner show us how we can learn from this elite group. Weaving together stories of forecasting successes (the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound) and failures (the Bay of Pigs) and interviews with a range of high-level decision makers, from David Petraeus to Robert Rubin, they show that good forecasting doesn’t require powerful computers or arcane methods. It involves gathering evidence from a variety of sources, thinking probabilistically, working in teams, keeping score, and being willing to admit error and change course. Superforecasting offers the first demonstrably effective way to improve our ability to predict the future—whether in business, finance, politics, international affairs, or daily life—and is destined to become a modern classic.

Este livro contém segredos para planear e executar com sucesso planos de qualquer escala, e partilhados pelo maior especialista do mundo em megaprojetos. Nada é mais inspirador do que uma grande visão que se torna uma nova e triunfante realidade. Pense em como o Empire State Building passou de um esboço a uma joia no horizonte de Nova Iorque em 21 meses, ou em como o iPod, da Apple, passou de um projeto com um único funcionário a um lançamento de produto em onze meses. De acordo com as estatísticas, porém, 92 % dos megaprojetos ultrapassam o orçamento ou o prazo, ou ambos. Mesmo os esforços mais modestos, como a criação de uma pequena empresa, falham frequentemente. Porquê? Bent Flyvbjerg, professor da Universidade de Oxford, dedicou a vida a compreender o que distingue os poucos triunfos de tantos insucessos. Em Como Fazer Grandes Coisas, Flyvbjerg identifica os erros de julgamento e as más decisões que levam ao fracasso de projetos, grandes ou pequenos. Mostra, também, como é provável que os seus próprios planos sejam bem-sucedidos se aplicar os princípios que ele investigou durante décadas.

Gardner presents landmark research debunking the whole expert prediction industry and explores our obsession with the future.