Deciding Our Futures

Futurists offer a toolbox for improving decision making.

As the world becomes more complex, the likelihood of making poor decisions about our future increases, as does the cost of bad outcomes.

Psychologists refer to two types of decision-making strategies: intuition and reason. Intuition is faster and often emotional, while reason is slower and logical. As the pace of our world accelerates, intuition may increasingly trump reason; "going with the gut" can be an efficient way to decide, but it can also lead to more errors.

It is becoming harder to make good decisions because it has become risky to simply rely on expert advice: Expertise has become fractured into smaller and smaller areas, leaving a gap in areas in which we may be unknowledgeable. Experience leaves us ill-prepared for judgments about wild-card events. And intuition is often based on biases that may lead us in the wrong direction.

This special section offers insights from futurists on ways that we can come to grips with the flaws in our decision-making processes and improve our strategies for making critical decisions about the future.

- Editors