Triage. Focus on questions where your hard work is likely to pay off.
Break seemingly intractable problems into tractable sub-problems... Decompose the problem into its knowable and unknowable parts. Flush ignorance into the open. Expose and examine your assumptions. Dare to be wrong by making your best guesses.
Strike the right balance between inside and outside views. Conduct creative searches for comparison classes even for seemingly unique events,
Strike the right balance between under- and overreacting to evidence. Snoop for nonobvious lead indicators, about what would have to happen before X could, where X might be anything.
Look for the clashing causal forces at work in each problem. For every good policy argument, there is typically a counterargument that is at least worth acknowledging. In classical dialectics, thesis meets antithesis, producing synthesis.
Strive to distinguish as many degrees of doubt as the problem permits but no more. Few things are either certain or impossible. And “maybe” isn’t all that informative. So your uncertainty dial needs more than three settings. Nuance matters. The more degrees of uncertainty you can distinguish, the better a forecaster you are likely to be.
Strike the right balance between under- and overconfidence, between prudence and decisiveness. Understand the risks both of rushing to judgment and of dawdling too long near “maybe.” Long-term accuracy requires getting good scores on both calibration and resolution.
Look for the errors behind your mistakes but beware of rearview-mirror hindsight biases. Don’t try to justify or excuse your failures. Conduct unflinching postmortems.
Bring out the best in others and let others bring out the best in you. Master the fine arts of team management, especially perspective taking (understanding the arguments of the other side so well that you can reproduce them to the other’s satisfaction), precision questioning (helping others to clarify their arguments so they are not misunderstood), and constructive confrontation (learning to disagree without being disagreeable).
Master the error-balancing bicycle. Implementing each commandment requires balancing opposing errors. Learning requires doing, with good feedback that leaves no ambiguity about whether you are succeeding—or whether you are failing.
Don’t treat commandments as commandments. Guidelines are the best we can do in a world where nothing is certain or exactly repeatable. Forecasting requires constant mindfulness.