Too many hands.

Some 15 percent of Americans live below the poverty line.  How much can the Obama administration do in four years to improve that situation?

February 14, 2013 [Wolf News/MSDNC]: In a Valentine's Day miracle, Congress and the administration today reached a long-term deal on the debt ceiling, taxes, and fiscal reform.

A group of rogue bipartisan realists from perfectly safe seats - the Washington DC and Guam delegates and the observer team from McMurdo Station, Antarctica, spurred along by a contingent of visiting Marines and Seal Team members glowering down from Senate and House galleries, publicly wondering exactly what they have been risking their lives to preserve - have brokered a deal to end the budget logjam. 

Hot Breaking News on the Fiscal Cliff!

Nate Silver's book The Signal and the Noise makes a darned good case for scenario-based strategic planning. 

In it, he raises the old distinction between "hedgehogs" and "foxes," from a fragment by the ancient Greek philosopher Archilochus via Isaiah Berlin: "The fox knows many little things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing."

"Foxes" in this dichotomy are nonideological and open thinkers not wedded to any one theory; they are comfortable with "nuance, uncertainty, complexity, and dissenting opinion."

[Sometimes the best scenario planning we scenario consultants can do is based on scenarios that will never actually occur.] 

JIM LEHRER: Good evening and welcome to the first 2012 presidential debate. This is the 413th debate I have moderated, and quite frankly, if there's a 414th, I will shoot myself in the eye with a nailgun. So independently of the debate organizers, I took it upon myself to break into the green rooms of the contestants and drop some truth serum into each of their elitist Evian water bottles. I'm looking forward to this - I hope you are as well.

Print newspapers seem to be going away. What happens when they do? It's not all about ink and paper.

Your scenario consultants imagine the future of Apple products to 2020...so you don't have to.

Ladies and gentlemen, I have 400 words of bad news: we may look back on 2012 as "the good old days of political cooperation."

After decades of trying to help clients anticipate the widest range of plausible possible future events, the following quote rings quite true to us: “Those who know more forecast very slightly better than those who know less.  But those with the most knowledge are often least reliable.” 

Daniel Kahneman, a winner of the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, published this conclusion in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow after extensive research including numerous statistical analyses.