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This is a planning guide to help you get the club on track each semester. It’s a good idea to go through this guide before the semester begins. The “Goal-setting” section should take about an hour; the rest will depend on what sorts of things you’ve already done.

🎯 Goal-setting (~1h)

Brainstorming (~10m)

What are your goals? It’s helpful to understand exactly what sorts of things you aim to get out of starting & building a forecasting club. Spend a few minutes now, and make sure to write your thoughts down on a separate document. You can use the below questions to guide your thoughts, but no need to follow them precisely:

  1. What do you want the average member of your club to have experienced? What do you want the most committed member of your club to have experienced? What do you and the organizers want to have experienced?
  2. Imagine it’s the end of this semester.
    1. Everything worked out really, really wonderfully! 95th percentile outcome! So: what happened?
    2. (Note: make sure to complete the above before reading on.)
    3. Okay, now imagine that everything you just described happened, but absolutely nothing else. What’s missing from the picture?
  3. Repeat steps 2(a-c), imagining instead that it’s four semesters from now.
  4. What’s the single best thing that you could imagine happening in your forecasting club?

Making your goals concrete (~5m)

From the brainstorm above, land on a set of 5-10 goals that will be your priorities, and 1-3 that will be your top priorities.

Now, try to make all of these easily falsifiable — in other words, if you time-travelled to the future, it should be quite clear whether or not you’ve achieved them (or at least made progress toward achieving them). If you want some examples of how to make your goals falsifiable, click below:

Backchaining (~20m)

For each of the goals you came up with above, work backwards from the goal, in concrete steps, to figure out what you can do to achieve it. Repeatedly ask yourself, “Concretely, how does one achieve that?”

Feel free to look through this guide for concrete templates & materials you can use.