The engineering of tomorrow's world today can only happen if we have some idea of what tomorrow’s world is going to be like. This leads us into the murky world of forecasting and strategy making, which are highly dangerous and difficult activities for most organisations. Of course if you have perfect knowledge about the future, then strategy making is relatively easy, as there are literally hundreds of effective decision making and optimisation methodologies available for this purpose. Sadly, finding reliable, accurate and concise knowledge about the future is anything but easy. This is the central problem of strategy making. Strangely enough, it is possible to accumulate relatively large amounts of raw data and information about the future, unfortunately processing and condensing this into useful knowledge is remarkably difficult. Information about the future can be hard (logical, deterministic and syntactic), but is mostly soft (vague, complex and semantic). Forecasters often ignore the latter because it is impossible to process normatively, however the appropriate use of Checkland’s Methodology (a soft methodology) can greatly improve this situation. In particular, this paper shows how Checkland’s Methodology and the correlation matrix can be used together, in order to discover patterns of information about the future that are more consistent, reliable and meaningful. This knowledge is critical for effective forecasting and strategy making.
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