The Po.Int Foundation focuses its activities in various areas, that are mainly considered as environs of great uncertainty. Hence, the characteristics of such environs are limited to those that are certain and permanent, vis-à-vis significant volatile mechanisms. Today’s information overload (or infoxication) can be dealt with by employing new technologies. However, at the core our methodologies are the achievements of science reaching Socrates and his modest: “I know that I know nothing.” We use all available and comprehensive knowledge offered to us by the developments of hard and social sciences.
We therefore take the challenge, to not only search for the answer to the question of “how things really are” (analysis), but we investigate all the “further developments” (forecasting), and why they matter.
At the heart of our activities lays thus the Socratic “critical thinking” – as well as our distinctive awareness as to the correctness of that very philosophy, i.e. the reliability in the pursuit of facts, the interpretation of their implications, taken from different angles. Notwithstanding the above we apply, for the purpose of our activities, other intellectual standards of critical thinking: honesty, clarity, precision, deepness, adequacy, completeness and conciseness of our own arguments.
Analyzing even the utmost serious issues means for our researchers to go through six basic steps:
- Clarifying the research topic, its various aspects and the relevant points of view, irrespective of its original shape.
- Determination of the basic facts relevant to the research topic (what we know and what we don’t know, and what else we need to know), by assessing the importance and organizing the said facts, and form variants with clearly defined assumptions in the absence of facts.
- Examine potential pitfalls in the analyzed area, such as: stereotypes, risks associated with classical cognitive errors, unwritten and silent assumptions.
- Generate and test (falsifiability test) hypotheses, potentially clarifying the observed phenomenon in the wake of known facts or modelling scenarios based on the possessed knowledge.
- Conduct a full, logical and diligent reasoning, while documenting the investigation and its conclusions based on previous analyses.
- Efficient and effective presentation of analytical results appropriate for the audience.
Having the above in mind and while conducting analyses of phenomena in a given area of research (analysis and forecasting) – for internal needs or that of our customers – we rely on our own team of experts. Experts hired or recommended by us investigate the subject matter(s) in an utmost impartial and objective manner. In some cases, we invite external but outstanding experts who either join us as team members or work on an individual basis. We particularly appreciate external experts who meet our methodological requirements/standards. We manage, in a similar approach, all of our educational curricula and other forms of educational trainings (workshops, seminars and conferences).
