How to Choose the Right Forecasting Technique

How Our Company Learned to Make Better Predictions About Everything

We all make bets about the future, whether we call them that or not. We select a career based on perceptions about its prospects; we take on projects based on what we think we can accomplish; we hire employees based on how we predict they will perform. We don’t have an option not to make predictions in our work lives, but we do have an option to try and make better ones. At Twitch, employees have worked to create a culture of forecasting based on the research of Philip Tetlock. Although employees were skeptical at first, most have come to embrace the practice of making frequent numerical forecasts.

Six Rules for Effective Forecasting

Reprint: R0707K The primary goal of forecasting is to identify the full range of possibilities facing a company, society, or the world at large. In this article, Saffo demythologizes the forecasting process to help executives become sophisticated and participative consumers of forecasts, rather than passive absorbers. He illustrates how to use forecasts to at once broaden understanding of possibilities and narrow the decision space within which one must exercise intuition. The events of 9/11, for example, were a much bigger surprise than they should have been. After all, airliners flown into monuments were the stuff of Tom Clancy novels in the 1990s, and everyone knew that terrorists had a very personal antipathy toward the World Trade Center. So why was 9/11 such a surprise? What can executives do to avoid being blindsided by other such wild cards, be they radical shifts in markets or the seemingly sudden emergence of disruptive technologies? In describing what forecasters are trying to achieve, Saffo outlines six simple, commonsense rules that smart managers should observe as they embark on a voyage of discovery with professional forecasters. Map a cone of uncertainty, he advises, look for the S curve, embrace the things that don’t fit, hold strong opinions weakly, look back twice as far as you look forward, and know when not to make a forecast.

Create Your Private Forecasting Platform

Launch your own private forecasting instance with Metaculus. Combine the power of predictive analytics with internal expertise to address key strategic questions within your organization.

Matakite — public forecasting

Public, timestamped forecasts as signed records in your own PDS.

AIA Forecaster: Technical Report

Forecasting is a universal problem. Any system that makes informed judgments about what may happen in the future relies on at least some degree of forecasting. In agriculture, this takes the form of predicting future crop yields and food system resilience (5; 44; 33). In biotechnology and medicine, clinical trials are carefully designed to help researchers predict the impact of newly developed treatments (37; 7). Elsewhere in biology, AlphaFold can be viewed as a form of forecasting protein folding structure under uncertainty (19). In academia, grant funding is a form of forecasting which scientific discoveries will be made conditional on funding (48). Climate and environmental science models local and long-term weather trends, which are of universal importance (42; 35; 12). In political science, forecasting election outcomes and the impact of policy decisions are an essential component of political calculus (17; 53; 10). Militaries make use of forecasting for threat assessment and conflict predictions (58; 36). Forecasting is the very heartbeat of financial firms, which use it to estimate future economic conditions in an uncertain world (49). Wherever there is uncertainty about the future, there is forecasting.

Does Forecasting Have Room At The Top?

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Top Forecasters On The Plague

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Forecast Graph · Sensemaker

Sensemaker's live public forecasts, evidence, market signals, belief updates, resolutions, and calibration.

How Accurate Have AI Progress Forecasts Been So Far? – Forecasting Research Institute

We take an initial look at where median forecasts are (mostly) underestimating and (sometimes) overestimating AI progress, adoption, and impact.

Blue Sky 2027 Daily, Weekly, and Monthly Planners

Stay ahead of your schedule with a Blue Sky 2027 planner. Choose from daily, weekly, or monthly academic layouts. Durable, stylish, and ready for the year.

Predicting market waves in SaaS

How to catch the market at the right time

The Expert Trap and the Next War

what forecasting failure tells us about the future

Leaderboards

A dynamic, continuously-updated forecasting benchmark.

Forecasting Research Institute on Twitter / X

Introducing the Automated AI Risk Outlook (AIRO): a dashboard of catastrophic risk forecasts from an ensemble of frontier AI models, updated weekly.Current ensemble forecasts of an AI-related catastrophe that kills at least 10% of the global population:• By 2030: 0.47%• By… pic.twitter.com/vc7F00L0Oa— Forecasting Research Institute (@Research_FRI) September 11, 2026