Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction by Wharton’s Philip Tetlock and Dan Gardner is another great read addressing analytics, human behavior and analytic technologies for establishing and sharpening forecasting abilities for any organization.
The book title is a wonderful attention grabber. We certainly live in the era of big data. Today business is driving the new age of immediacy.
Superforecasting acknowledges data lessons supplied by Nate Silver’s The Signal and the Noise as helping to define standards to data and how it misled the national media.
Yet just into the second chapter Tetlock and Gardner point to the research by Daniel Kahneman excellent work Thinking Fast and Slow to help determine behaviors shaped over time that have fundamentally changed how we predict success.
Superforecasting is one of the better books that I have found levels the playing field for data reporting and forecasting from the executive boardroom to the company lunchroom. The ability to focus on even the language of number in predicting weather now proven clearly so the reader can actually make this at any organization to drive a wider adoption of reporting and prediction standards.
As Tetlock and Gardner return to Dan Kahneman’s book they do show how System 2 thinking can prevail. The study about the Kennedy Administration handling of The Bay of Pigs invasion and The Cuban Missile Crisis go beyond groupthink and give historical background as the same team was involved in the decision-making process with President Kennedy regarding both events.
The combination of this book, Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow, Tom Davenport’s analytics book Keeping up with the Quants and Nicolas Taleb’s The Black Swan are simply fascinating reading during the holiday and providing a rich source of material and history lessons to apply into the day-to-day operations of any organization seeking to make better decisions based upon data.