Defence

How to Think About Strategic Futures

Paul Monk

Just under three years ago, in the third chapter of Thunder from the Silent Zone: Rethinking China, I argued that too much strategic planning with regard to China appeared to be based on simple linear extrapolations of macro-economic growth trends. We need, I wrote, to engage instead in some reasonably sophisticated scenario planning, if we are not to find ourselves caught out by strategic surprises in the decades ahead. More generally, there is a case to be made that too much strategic planning is based on linear and predictive thinking, laying traps for the unwary.

Even as the book was in press, I had the pleasure of reading Philip Tetlock’s remarkable study Expert Political Judgement: How Good Is It? How Can We Know? His data showed that linear forecasting by experts in the domains of politics and geopolitics has a dismal track record—it is almost as random in its success rate as that of expert forecasting in financial markets. However, his findings as regards the utility of scenario planning were hardly more reassuring. It can actually be counter-productive, he argued, by causing us to misread the relative probabilities of various dramatic scenarios.

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