So my experience is that identifying/specifying/generating the right questions is at least 50% of the benefit, if not higher. There are lots of reasons organisations struggle with this, from: organisational incentives; incoherent steers and views from senior managers; lack of accountability and ownership; to simply not recognising that they are trying to do a prediction.
This is why forecasting funding that has focused on improving forecasting accuracy is flawed, because it doesn’t matter how accurate you are if your question isn’t of use to the decision making process.
The problem exists at both those “levels”, but the most important one to solve for an organisation is the first one. Issues with resolution criteria etc. decrease accuracy but as long as people’s rationale’s are explicit you can bridge that gap (i.e. I know why one person was higher and another was lower, it was because they both took the resolution to mean something slightly differently). But if the question/problem you are trying to solve in the first instance is wrong, then the whole thing is a waste of time and energy.
So my experience is that identifying/specifying/generating the right questions is at least 50% of the benefit, if not higher. There are lots of reasons organisations struggle with this, from: organisational incentives; incoherent steers and views from senior managers; lack of accountability and ownership; to simply not recognising that they are trying to do a prediction.
This is why forecasting funding that has focused on improving forecasting accuracy is flawed, because it doesn’t matter how accurate you are if your question isn’t of use to the decision making process.
The problem exists at both those “levels”, but the most important one to solve for an organisation is the first one. Issues with resolution criteria etc. decrease accuracy but as long as people’s rationale’s are explicit you can bridge that gap (i.e. I know why one person was higher and another was lower, it was because they both took the resolution to mean something slightly differently). But if the question/problem you are trying to solve in the first instance is wrong, then the whole thing is a waste of time and energy.