John Mahaffie

“A professional futurist is a person who studies the future in order to help people understand, anticipate, prepare for and gain advantage from coming changes. It is not the goal of a futurist to predict what will happen in the future. The futurist uses foresight to describe what could happen in the future and, in some cases, what should happen in the future.” — Association of Professional Futurists

That’s a good definition, rooted, as you’d expect, in considerations of the future. And it nicely characterizes what I do. But what’s even more fundamental about my work is getting people to think differently.

When I work with groups to help them explore change, what I realize is how much they already know, at least about the near-term future. But their view is too narrow. They need help: advice, tools, an independent pair of eyes, to see past the immediate, change their perspective, and get somewhere new. They need to think differently.

Foresight is a superb capability. It jumps your thinking beyond what’s in your inbox, beyond what’s going on today that is soaking up your time and attention. It opens up a space to anticipate change, and to do so with colleagues.

But that fresh thinking needn’t only be about the future. Opening a door and looking out, encountering something new, even in the here and now, is already transformational. Of course, foresight helps. It keeps you from falling back into narrower thinking patterns. It helps makes sure you think differently.

In working to get people to look out further into the future, we have to understand and work with people’s immediate concerns. Those concerns are an obstacle to long-term thinking until they get acknowledged, discussed, and put in a longer-term context. Most often, people have at least some fear about change and uncertainty, even if they don’t realize that motivation, and cannot express it.

But they can reflect on what’s on their minds, what they are unsure about, and what they think could be bad, versus good, as the future unfolds. What’s on most people’s minds includes global, national, and regional events and problems, and the big, immediate things facing their family or business.

For business people, with quarterly revenue targets, this year’s performance review, a new technology roll-out, on their minds, the long-view has trouble getting a purchase on their thinking. With a war, an election, a looming recession, and a lending crisis on their minds, the long-view fades from view too easily. But truly being prepared for the future means we have to look past the immediate situation.

When I present to groups on the future, I choose a set of broad forces of change to explore with them. Each of those forces is part of a long-term future—10 or 15 years into the future, at least. But each has to also be clearly understood from a perspective of today. Ultimately, my futures work is about the present and the future. The future starts momentarily and everything about it is built from what we have now. There is no disconnect between the future and the present.

For example, futurists generally agree that we will see rising prosperity in much of the world, over the next few decades (though most also explore potential discontinuities that could derail that growth). But facing a group of businesspeople and telling them that prosperity is rising is harder with a US recession and larger economic crises unfolding.

It’s essential to not allow an immediate situation drown out important messages about the future. We have to acknowledge what’s on people’s minds right now, and show them how it fits into a longer-term context. That means using ideas about the future to, for a time, set our thinking beyond the present situation, focusing on what could be true, in 10 or 20 years.

Deep down, it’s about thinking differently

The short-term view and the long-term view