futurist

7 Deadly sins of foresight

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1. Ignoring the future (You let today's concerns give you an excuse to not focus on the future) [See: Keep an eye on the future while righting the ship].

2. Shortsightedness (You only think a few years into the future) [See: The foresight gap: what too many organizations get wrong]

3. Mistaking the present for the future (You mistake fixing things and catching up with today for being future-focused) [See: If you're only keeping up you're probably going backwards]

4. Narrowness (You fail to realize your future will be shaped by a much larger one which you need to understand) [See: Foresight illustrated: choosing how broad a view to take while exploring the future]

5. All else held equal (You let your attention focus on just one change, and assume everything else stays the same) [A solution is to use scenarios– fleshed out views of the future — to make sure you explore how multiple changes will unfold. See: Why we need scenarios to be ready for the future] 

6. Lack of vision (You have not thought through nor communicated the future you want or expect) [See: You can't be what you can't see]

7. Deafness (You don't listen to others, or pay attention to signals of change) [See: Talk to the frog]

For more on pitfalls and "deadly sins" for foresight see: 13 mistakes you make when exploring the future

For good habits in foresight that can fight these sins, see:  27 habits of highly effective futurists

Image: detail from Hieronymus Bosch, The seven deadly sins and the four last things, circa 1500. Museo del Prado, Madrid. Public domain.

Foresight is like fitness

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Fitness Studio Fitness Studio Training DumbbellsForesight is work you do to get ready for the future. What will come at you? How ready are you to respond?

Most of what you will have to respond to is out in the unknown space that is your future. But you can prepare for the things you’ll do, though less often the exact things you’ll do. You need general foresight fitness.

Consider the gym-goer. She works out, building strength, flexibility, endurance, and agility. Her goal? Being ready for things she wants to do, and for life itself. She wants to be stronger, more flexible, and to feel good. Then she is better prepared for what life will throw at her. Daily life gives her physical challenges. And she may choose and reach for other challenges. Going in strong, flexible, agile, and with greater endurance makes everything else better.

Fitness as a metaphor for foresight
Fitness goal Foresight goal
Build strength Be more positive, prepared, and intentional about change
Gain endurance Grow the sustainability of your organization. Make it one capable of surviving and mastering change without spending or wearing itself out
Increase flexibility Improve speed to action and readiness to maneuver
Develop agility Become more practiced at responding to change

 

Foresight does this. Here’s how:

Exploring the future means exercising our minds—by exploring “what ifs.” We practice thinking about our response to change. We get stronger at anticipating future change, but also responding to it as it happens.

As with the gym, you can look at general training. Strength training and cardio, for example, give you general fitness. Exploring the future landscape 10 years out gives you strength as you face uncertainty. You can tailor efforts to specific needs. A baseball player works on the power with the bat by using a cable machine to simulate a baseball swing.

You can do something like this with foresight. Scenarios for your sector or a new technology let you prepare for responses to specific challenges and opportunities. 

So what about measurement? The gym analogy weakens. Yes, you can measure muscle and endurance with weights and times. But there isn’t a clear parallel for that in foresight. We don’t count trends gathered, for example, to measure the success of foresight.

But fitness has evolved far from “how much can you bench?” Fitness pros understand what matters is overall fitness, not some “look at me” measure of strength. Old gym rats are still measuring themselves on how much they can bench press or the circumference of their biceps. But modern-day fitness is about broad and holistic good health.

So is foresight. So get fit and stay fit, and you’ll enjoy a healthier future.

I'd love to help you learn more about how to do this. Call/email: 202-271-0444 and jbmahaffie@leadingfuturists.biz. 

Hey futurist, represent!

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100PercentFuturistIf foresight is a good thing, if knowing a little more about the future we face helps us all, then we ought to be willing to live and play the role of futurist. We ought to out ourselves, with everyone, and represent the future view.

What does it mean to "represent" as a futurist?

  • Use the "F" words: futurist, futures, foresight–you don't have to be credentialed as a futurist to do this.
  • Make no apologies for the view you take or the work you do. "I am a futurist" "I study the future" "I can help you understand your future better".
  • Speak out for the future, represent the future view in conversations, on committees, in your leadership, in your community, in your family. Help people get their view Get forward, instead of always in the mode of looking backwards at what happened, what should of happened, who's to blame, etc.

If you do this right, people should look to you when they see a need to think longer term. They should say, "what do you think?" They should expect it from you and rely upon it. And they should see you as a mentor in matters of foresight. And if you do this right, you will be making a difference to everyone's future.

Is your focus past or forward?

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This blog post from a couple of years ago Are You a Paster, Presentist, or Futurist? offers a nice thought experiment on the idea that people may be focused past, on the present, or toward the future.

It’s not deeply developed in the piece, but the idea is one worth exploring, and it fits my discoveries about myself, and others.

I’ve found that I have an innate focus on what will happen next or later, and once something has taken place, while it’s interesting to think about why it happened, I don’t obsess on that. And sometimes I get peevish when people won’t let go of something that happened, or should have, in the past. I want to say, “never mind, water under the bridge, eyes forward.” I want to play with ideas about what may happen next, maybe get that right.

And this, of course, is helpful to my work as a futurist.

Anachronisms

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In 10th grade, my English teacher, Mr. Simmons, put anachronism on our vocabulary test, and gave us the definition to memorize: “Something out of place or time”. Anachronisms are at issue in my professional work as a futurist and in my fiction writing. My futures work involves remembering that the future isn’t mostly the same as today, with a few changes (e.g. using only brainwaves to drive an internal combustion engine, gasoline-powered, four-door sedan).

My fiction writing has to involve intent focus on what would and would not be present in my stories, and since I’ve focused mainly on writing fiction set in the past, the potential for anachronisms is high.

Mr. Simmons used a broader definition of anachronism than most people do, most often, people use it to mean something in the present from the past, which no longer belongs. That’s the least of my worries. A story set in 2013 could have a butter churn standing in the corner, since such things can still exist as antiques (though the thing ought to be explained) but a story set in 1916 cannot have a mobile phone or a woman fighter pilot in it.

The arts of fiction and foresight involve thinking intently about these things. Everything matters. All the details count, and wrong details count multiply, and do only harm. It’s probably harder in futures, because we really don’t know what will change and how much. But in historical fiction, we can at least rule a lot of things out.

The biggest problem is not in material things, but in values and attitudes. It’s too easy to shine a current-day light on the past or the future which supposes that people back then or in that future will have the same values as today. They won’t or didn’t. I’ve learned to be humble about all this, it’s hard to get it right and you need to keep a watchful eye on yourself, and work at it.

Image: Mike Licht, via Flickr, creative commons attribution license

Six things studying the future has taught me about fiction writing

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On my foresight blog, I posted the reverse of this: “Six things fiction writing taught me about foresight” [LINK] 

Since the late 1980s, I’ve worked in the field of futures studies, also known as foresight. I am a consultant to any organization that will hire me to explore how the world is changing and where they might see challenges and find opportunities in that change. That work prepared me in certain ways for writing fiction. In fact, a big part of the work of a futurist is like writing fiction. Nothing is wholly known or provable about the future, so, in essence, you make it up. But like a novelist, you make up something based on logic, truth, and facts. My fiction work is based in history, and I stick to contextual setting truths about history, even as I have my way with my human characters within that reality.

Here are some key things I’ve carried from my work as a futurist to my efforts as a novelist:

1. Technology changes, but it’s the human changes that spring from that which matter most. I don’t write science fiction, but even Sci-Fi, in my limited experience with it, is really about the human things that technology does.

2. Placement in time of a story is a critical step and in that setting you have to get the conjecture right; avoiding anachronisms  and being as true as anyone can be to the times you are writing about. Whether a story is set in the future or the past, it’s important work to avoid putting too much of today’s values into the minds of people of another time. This is unavoidable, but we still have to try.

3. The world is a complex of systems connected to systems. Nothing is simple, and nothing has just one cause.

4. Conjecture is essential, and I’ve had the chance to build a habit of, and comfort with conjecture over years of working to suppose things about the future.

5. Storytelling has proven essential to getting across ideas about change in my work as a futurist. The stories meet what’s already in people’s heads, what George Lakoff calls “frames”. In fiction, your story doesn’t have much success unless it does that. So though we strive for originality, our characters may fit archetypes and other known qualities that the reader brings.

6. Exaggeration, or sharp contrasts, may make the difference in storytelling, as they do in getting ideas about the future across to people. So, even if we don’t think it will ever happen, we may spend time talking or writing as futurists about “what ifs” such as “zero waste” or “free energy.” In fiction, the lives of our characters cannot just be ordinary lives, at least not without something big happening too. We exaggerate, you could say, or at least draw sharp contrasts.

Image: rahego, via Flickr, Creative Commons Attribution License

Sensemaking and strangemaking

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At the 2012 Association of Professional Futurists Professional Development day in Toronto, July 2012, we explored design thinking and its role in futures. In the orienting discussions that led off our design work, we talked about the roles futurists play in helping people explore our changing world and what it means. And that role is a frequent topic of this blog, too.

I had not before used the term “strangemaking,” but our design-focused presenters, including Greg Van Alstyne, of the Ontario College of Art and Design, Strategic Innovation Lab, and Lloyd Walker, Precurve, who is a long-time futures colleague, talked about how part of the work of foresight is “strangemaking” which designers sometimes refer to as meaning to make the familiar, strange.

Exploring the future should include strangemaking. And then, on the other hand, it should also include sensemaking. I guess that looks like a contradiction, but the view is clear: when an organization is too focused on what it knows, too narrowly following and building within the familiar, it needs to think new thoughts, try new ideas, and so make the familiar strange for a while.

Meanwhile, most organizations are confronted with an awful lot that is strange or unclear. Usually that is what lies in the blurry periphery of what they know and can see and understand. For them, a big need is sensemaking. They need help, help that a futurist, among others, can offer, in getting clear on the changes surrounding them and in finding new ways of thinking about their interests, their stakeholders, their markets, and so on.

So, on balance, what is my job as a futurist? I think it is to draw the strange in for a close look, let it be strange and new to people, but then before long to help them understand it.

So let’s help people:

1). Make the familiar strange, by showing some surprising but plausible ways it could change, keeping the focus on what isn’t true today but what could be true in the future. That will even mean spending time looking at extreme possibilities.

2). Make the strange familiar, not by avoiding it, or ignoring it, or trying to force it into something it’s not, but rather by framing up a view of the future in a way that helps people understand and interpret it.

That balance of purposes is a thought that futurist Peter Bishop, the leader of the University of Houston Futures Studies in Commerce program crystallized for our Toronto gathering. It’s not sensemaking or strangemaking, it’s both. Thanks Peter!

ForesightCulture’s top 12 posts of 2011

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Of the 41 posts to ForesightCulture during 2011, the 12 below got the most visitors. The list reflects my main focus: the art and craft of exploring the future. Two posts got particularly personal for futurists, and drew a lot of interest from people in the field:

“I am a futurist, leave off the quote marks” and “A typology of futurists”

Just one post on the “content” side, i.e. about the future, made it in too, a 2021 scenario of a shopper.

Here are the top posts for 2011 in order:

  1. Get comfortable with complexity — How we have to fight the tendency to explain change as have a single cause, and embrace that things are complex: many forces, interacting.
  2. Foresight tool: A simple scanning technique to open up your thinking — A simple tool for triggering more and deeper thinking in your environmental scanning.
  3. I am a futurist. Leave off the quote marks! — Why futurist is a genuine profession. How futurists bring value. An argument to leave off the air quotes when you talk about futurists.
  4. A typology of futurists — Musing over different “types” of futurists; what they do and why it’s powerful.
  5. 5 critical things in foresight — The five things you must have for foresight: a purpose, a mindset, a habit, a toolkit, and a community.
  6. The short-term view and the long-term view — How we need to acknowledge, but not limit our thinking to, people’s immediate, near-term concerns.
  7. Foresight illustrated: Choosing how broad a view to take when exploring the future — A visual model for exploring “what future?” and how far into the future you should look (your time horizon).
  8. Get comfortable with uncertainty — How you have to tolerate uncertainty, and help others do so, when you explore your future.
  9. Offsetting your suburban, middle class, white collar bias — Ways to relieve the biases you may bring to looking at the future by getting out and seeing how things are made.
  10. A 2021 shopper’s path to purchase — A scenario of a possible 2021 consumer experience: the consumer’s path the purchase, enabled by technology.
  11. 9 things that “lock us in” in our thinking — Nine ways our thinking is narrowed, clouded, or misguided, and some advice on what to do about it.
  12. Experiencing the future Part 1: Getting beyond analysis and changing minds — Comparing the problems of the historian/archaeologist and futurist in getting people to deeper understanding, and a call for the experiential in foresight.

Thanks to all my readers for their interest this year. Have a terrific holiday season and a happy new year.

I am a futurist. Leave off the quote marks!

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Please don't put quotes around the name of my profession. And don't make the air quotes with your fingers, either. Futurists are bona fide experts in exploring change, and we give our colleagues and clients enormous value.

–>A futurist is the person who helps you think past what's in your inbox, right now

–>A futurist is the person who gives you new ways to think about how the world is changing, and can get you past merely reacting to change you don't like, getting you to taking action on change you can benefit from

–>A futurist is the first person to bring a critical change in technology to your attention, and the one who tells you what it might mean, and why it might matter

–>A futurist is the person who helps you convince colleagues that they are thinking narrowly, and short term, and that thinking is a best a loss of opportunity, and at worst, dangerous for the organization

–>A futurist can help you and your colleagues rethink the business you are in because conditions are changing, and trends are creating new challenges and opportunities

And a futurist will never bore you at a party. Have a chat with us. A please don't just say, so you're a "futurist" supplying the air quotes with your hands or the tone of your voice. Leave that off. Thankyou!

Personal futures matter too, perhaps most of all

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A futurist colleague of mine, Verne Wheelwright, has created a body of work on personal futures, including a book It's Your Future: Make it a Good One, and an accompanying workbook. His goal is to take the ways futurists think about what's shaping organizations, technologies, cities, countries, and so on, and help individuals apply those approaches to their personal lives.

Verne writes that you can know a lot about your future, shape it to be what you want it to be, and avoid a lot of unpleasant things that can happen along the way. You can do that "by simply thinking about your future in a systematic manner [using a] system that leads you through the exploration of your future and then shows you how to decide on and achieve the future you want."

What could be more valuable or important than that? And yet how rare it is for people to think beyond a broad vision about their life and its possibilities. Most of us, even if we've taken a 30-year mortgage, have not made our expectations about our life 30 years out clear or complete.

This is a unique body of work and may be a terrific resource for you to come to grips with your future, and have the best chance to make it what you want it to be. What it does so well is to open up, and add concreteness to your thinking. Thought most of us have some idea about what we want in life, too often we don't know enough about what we will do, and what it will take to get there, nor about the things we will confront along the way (e.g. aging parents, dependent adult children, career changes, financial crises, financial windfalls, etc.)

You can order the book through Verne's website: www.vernewheelwright.com, or through Amazon. The workbook is a free download from Verne's Personal Futures website. You can use the Personal Futures workbook with or without the book.

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