Intro to Crowdsourced Forecasts

When you run a decomposition in ARC on your strategic issue, the output is a list of key drivers and trackable indicators. From these indicators, ARC can also generate forecast questions to collect probabilistic insights from your experts and team that can better inform your analysis and decision-making on that issue. For a more detailed overview of how to integrate crowd forecasting insights, see this article. 

Below are instructions to generate forecast questions and collect probabilities: 

1. Prepare: Enter your strategic issue (also called your research question) in ARC and run a Decomposition. This will generate key drivers and indicators of your issue, which you can refine and iterate. It's recommended you do this step first to give you a better sense for how you might choose to scope & prioritize your specific forecasting questions. 

2. Determine your forecast questions 

• Navigate to the Crowdsource Forecasts tab
• ARC will automatically generate suggested forecast questions based on your decomposition
• Select one of the suggested forecast questions or write your own

3. Invite forecasters & collect probabilities

• In the popup box that appears after selecting a suggested question, or choosing to write one, enter the email addresses of individuals to invite them to forecast on the question
• Forecasters will receive an email invitation to submit a probabilistic forecast. They do not need to create an account on ARC to do so.
• Forecasters may update their forecast by submitting a new forecast at the same link.

4. Review forecasts

• Once forecasts have been submitted, the consensus probability will be shown in the Crowd Forecast tab.
• Individual forecasts and accompanying rationales will be shown below the consensus probability.
  

Since your team of forecasters can continuously update their forecasts over time on a given question, this allows you to get real-time insights whenever you need them. Simply remind your forecasters to update - and see how useful these insights are to have as part of your decision-making.