This distinction reveals another important feature of S curves, which is that they are fractal in nature. Very large, broadly defined curves are composed of small, precisely defined and linked S curves. For a forecaster, the discovery of an emergent S curve should lead you to suspect a larger, more important curve lurking in the background. Miss the larger curve and your strategy may amount to standing on a whale, fishing for minnows.
The art of forecasting is to identify an S-curve pattern as it begins to emerge, well ahead of the inflection point. The tricky part of S curves is that they inevitably invite us to focus on the inflection point, that dramatic moment of takeoff when fortunes are made and revolutions launched. But the wise forecaster will look to the left of the curve in hopes of identifying the inflection point’s inevitable precur- sors. Consider Columbus’s 1492 voyage. His discovery falls at the inflection point of Western exploration. Columbus was not the first fifteenth-century explorer to go to the New World – he was the first to make it back, and he did so at a moment when his discovery would land like a spark in the economic tinder of a newly emergent Europe and launch thousands upon thousands of voyages westward. Noting the earlier, less successful voyages, a good forecaster would have seen that the moment was ripe for an inflection point and could have advised the Portuguese that it would be unwise to turn down Columbus’s request.