I’m not much of one for citing economists approvingly, but in this QZ piece devoted to distinguishing a clusterfuck situation from a mere SNAFU or shitshow, there’s an interesting note on Daniel Kahneman’s approach to forward planning:

Before a big decision, teams should undertake what Kahneman calls a “premortem.” Split the group in two. One is assigned to imagine a future in which the project is an unmitigated success. The other is to envision its worst-case scenario. Each group then writes a detailed story of the project’s success or failure, outlining the steps and decisions that led to each outcome. Imagining failure and thinking backwards to its causes helps groups identify the strengths and weaknesses of their current plans, and adjust accordingly.

That flies in the face of the vast majority of corporate foresight and “innovation fostering” practice, which still tends to focus relentlessly (some might even say myopically) on the positive, a strategy doubled down upon by the repeated uncritical use of template narratives based on the Hero’s Journey… and indeed it flies in the face of recent griping about the way dystopian science fiction supposedly poisons the well of futurity by portraying clusterfuck futures.

Why not hire a cynic now, while you’ve still got a budget to hire with?