I'm catching up on my Scientific American reading, and just finished the April issue. There's an excellent article titled "Shaping the Future" which discusses how to make robust policy choices in the face of scientific uncertainty about the future. Their biggest example is climate change, but they also mention sustainable development, bringing products to market, and many more. Their method, which focuses on flexible plans and then analyzes how any given plan would fare under a wide variety of possible futures, reduces the need for forecasting the future (the method traditionally used to decide policy, and the method most likely to be wrong). The full article gives more details, and is a great read.
Posted by Tom Nugent at July 5, 2005 10:13 AM