describe role of hindsight and foresight thinking in one's life.
Answers
Explanation:
The purpose of this paper is to deepen understanding of the role that hindsight plays in foresight. The authors argue that the past is not an isolated static state, but one that is intimately connected with the future. However, there are several biases that influence our perceptions and conceptions of the past. These biases act as constraints on our ability to understand the driving forces that emerge from the past, play out through the present and become the critical uncertainties in the future. They could result in misperceptions about events or processes and so may impair foresight methodologies, such as scenario thinking. Such a foresight bias is characterized by a combination of hindsight biases, creeping determinism and searching for information that corresponds to people’s views about both the past and the future.The cognitive linkages between past, present and future are discussed and the role of counter-to-factual analysis is emphasized as an antidote to the foresight bias. Counter-to-factual analysis is both a cognitive process and an analytical reasoning tool applied to the analysis of historical data. Using insights generated from the explorations of counter-to-factual reasoning, the authors present a hindsight-foresight paragon that fortifies current foresight enhancing techniques with counter-to-factual analysis.Two Roads diverged in a yellow wood,And sorry I could not travel bothAnd be one traveler, long I stoodTo where it bent in the undergrowth…Two roads diverged in a wood, and I–I took the one less traveled by,And that has made all the difference.The Road Not Taken, Robert FrostMen’s curiosity searches past and futureAnd clings to that dimension. But to apprehendThe point of intersection of the timelessWith time, is an occupation for the saint—T. S. Eliot, from The Dry Salvages
Request full-text
To read the full-text of this research, you can request a copy directly from the authors.
Citations (71)
References (59)
Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to deepen understanding of the role that hindsight plays in foresight. The authors argue that the past is not an isolated static state, but one that is intimately connected with the future. However, there are several biases that influence our perceptions and conceptions of the past. These biases act as constraints on our ability to understand the driving forces that emerge from the past, play out through the present and become the critical uncertainties in the future. They could result in misperceptions about events or processes and so may impair foresight methodologies, such as scenario thinking. Such a foresight bias is characterized by a combination of hindsight biases, creeping determinism and searching for information that corresponds to people’s views about both the past and the future.The cognitive linkages between past, present and future are discussed and the role of counter-to-factual analysis is emphasized as an antidote to the foresight bias. Counter-to-factual analysis is both a cognitive process and an analytical reasoning tool applied to the analysis of historical data. Using insights generated from the explorations of counter-to-factual reasoning, the authors present a hindsight-foresight paragon that fortifies current foresight enhancing techniques with counter-to-factual analysis.Two Roads diverged in a yellow wood,And sorry I could not travel bothAnd be one traveler, long I stoodTo where it bent in the undergrowth…Two roads diverged in a wood, and I–I took the one less traveled by,And that has made all the difference.The Road Not Taken, Robert FrostMen’s curiosity searches past and futureAnd clings to that dimension. But to apprehendThe point of intersection of the timelessWith time, is an occupation for the saint—T. S. Eliot, from The Dry Salvages
... Those deemed to be much more plausible with overarching implications may then be selected and used as primer to develop two additional scenarios. For scenarios to be worth pursuing, they need to be very compelling visions that are not detached from the very world in which they are expected to play out (plausible), and they should be modelled by drawing on internal resources and structures as well as external factors that may have a likely impact on the future (internal consistency) (Mackay and McKiernan, 2004). While the prospect of scenario planning contributing to competitiveness has been widely oversold, we know very little about what really counts as compelling and plausible scenarios and most importantly the knowledge that goes into their generate .