Final Session...

 The African proverb, “Tomorrow belongs to the people who prepare for it today” is really relevant to our generation! Future projections which we may be forecasted by us today could very different of what the reality may be. Thus, forecasting and at the same time taking precaution to wisely use current and upcoming technologies, should be on par. But firstly, why bother with foresight? Prof Shahi posed a question to us asking if we should work from the past or work backwards from the future. Working backwards from the future, is where we paint a scene where we see what we want the future to be, and use that as a final goal, destination, or motivation even to bring an organisation forward. This seems very uncertain and risky as projecting the future could be very different from what it might shape up to be. However, just one example had me change my mind immediately and that was Steve Jobs. He had a vision to create the Mac and its profound features, lo and behold, his vision has survived and thrived well.

There have been a lot of upcoming innovations and inventions, but truth be told, many are completely redundant which  are not useful for the betterment of societies as a whole but only specific in their benefits to a small groups. Thus, much of the current resources especially monetary resources are carefully being channelled to support or invest in the “right” kind of technology. This is very relevant to developing countries where the resources are already pretty much scarce. However, if everything was to be taken with so much precaution and new technologies would have been discarded, who knows, it could have been something would revolutionise the future. Nobody will know which technology ought to be encouraged or not, a difficult decisions that, managers or CEOs have to take.

Wen Cong’s presentation was truly supportive of the session’s content on future forecasting. He spoke on the 6 rules of effective forecasting technology that was valuable in providing us with an insight on importance of prediction. However, yet again, there are limitations to this where forecasting cannot be the answer to our future. Only with checks and balances in place and stringently following a procedure will forecasting bring benefits and shape a stable future.

With interesting ideas that were mentioned in the session, I would rate this class an 8/10!