prediction

Futurists are presentists: The true purpose of a forecast

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The other day my friend Holly asked me about my track record as a futurist. Holly is a journalist and has a knack for asking quiet, incisive questions.

I had told her about co-authoring a book in the 1990s about the year 2025. [2025 : Scenarios of US and Global Society Reshaped by Science and Technology] Holly’s question got me thinking about the purpose of my work.

It’s reasonable for people to expect futurists to predict the future. But accurate prediction is not the real value of our work. What futurists do is very much about today. Forecasts should show the range of and directions of change that get us started toward a desired future. The forecast endpoint is not the point.

There is little point in framing an idea about the future and then waiting ten or fifteen years to see “Did you get it right?” Today is where foresight has its power. 

The best question I could ask when we get to 2025 is: Did people who read 2025 in the late 1990s act differently because of the ideas in the book?

Why did we write 2025? To help business people in the late 1990s understand change and potential for the future in that year. So my book, 2025, published in 1996, was for people in 1996 to understand future possibility.

As the year 2025 approaches, I still expect to be embarrassed about where we were wrong. Most often that will be about what we did not forecast at all and where we were too optimistic. But I should forget about it. That was not the point or the purpose of the book. 

How should you think about this?

When you work with a futurist or engage with the future, know your today reasons. Allow the process to range imaginatively over future ideas. But don’t worry about certainty and accuracy at some future date. Explore what those ideas tell you about what to do now.

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For some further thoughts on this, see What do futurists really do?

Pollyanna had the right idea

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In a controlled study, researchers found people routinely willing to swap similar pens with others, but less willing to exchange lottery tickets. The reason? The lottery ticket in your hand has a potential future value which may—you don’t know—exceed that of another ticket. You don’t want to swap away a ticket that might turn out to be the winner. This happens even if the subjects of the experiment are reminded that probability shows either ticket has an equal likelihood of being a winner.

With pens, you are not likely to come out behind. A pen’s a pen, and neither your pen nor the other guy’s is the key to a future fortune. This shows how potential future regret shapes our decisions in the present.

So we have a tendency to anticipate having regret in the future. That means regret is not only a back-facing emotion, it also shapes our view forward, and so it shapes our future. The regret we feel can be about a missed future chance, an anticipation of failure, or an expectation that we will come up short in how we handle change.

The antonym of regret is satisfaction, and I would argue that anticipated satisfaction can be a powerful motivator for the future. But we have to allow ourselves to proceed with confidence armed with a vision of a positive future. That means that positive scenarios of our future are a strong motivator.

There’s not likely to be much of an outcome if you go around expecting the worse, starting up with your regret even before things have transpired. This sort of sour approach to the present and the future is nothing but destructive. In my view, Pollyanna had it about right—we need a positive outlook and we can help build that with a focus on the future that gets us to positive ideas about the future. Along the way exploring people’s fears, but also their hopes about the future will help the cause.

See also a recent Time piece, “The Optimism Bias” on how we have an optimism bias and why we should.

I’ve also weighed in before on hope, optimism, and the future:

Fighting back for foresight

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With great regularity, journalists and other writers pen pieces on the decline of futures or on failed predictions. Our professional futurist colleagues have often boiled this down to a shorthand: “where’s my flying car?”

We have often joined our colleagues in the Association of Professional Futurists (www.profuturists.org) to compile responses to these pieces. The World Future Society (www.wfs.org) also works hard to counter misperceptions about futurists and foresight work. Most in the field feel that the field is doing well, and that attention to the future is improving around the world. That many of our colleagues in organizations have futures job titles and responsibilities is good evidence for that.

At Leading Futurists LLC we believe foresight is doing well, but that we have more battles yet to fight. The value proposition of the field is changing from provocative “out there” thinking to ideas about change that organizations can respond to today.

Foresight and futures thinking tools are becoming part of everyday strategy making in organizations. Futures-minded people serve on or consult to teams as the people who understand the inevitability of change and what it means to the organization. They bring a knowledge base about the future to bear on an organization’s strategies and actions.

But though foresight is gaining ground, in too many organizations short-term thinking reigns, and it dominates in society overall. We battle the widespread conviction that what is relevant is the immediate scene; this quarter’s performance and today’s issues. Short-term thinking is a condition of organizational life, and it will drive out habitual foresight, if we let it. So let’s get to work on the problem.

Making foresight a daily habit of more people in more organizations is a new kind of work. It is different from just being provocative and wowing an audience with gee whiz ideas about startling new technologies. Here’s what we need to do instead:

  • Keep the future on the agenda, bring up trends and themes of change in work meetings and planning sessions
  • Change what people expect when you talk about the future from the gee whiz, to useful, actionable ideas about emerging challenges and opportunities
  • As you get a new insight on the future from your scanning, think about who the 5 or 6 people in your organization are who you know should see it. Send it along to them with a comment or interpretation. Any busy colleague will appreciate it.
  • Show people how to think about change. Model this by giving people an image of the future that relates to a question they are grappling with. For example, in the packaging sector, you imagine for them a near term future in which every package has a radio-frequency ID tag on it for automated inventory and checkout.

These are some of the things to do to normalize foresight and make it a daily habit in your organization. They are steps toward truly having a Foresight Culture.

It’s ok to be wrong

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Potato Chip FutureThe goal of exploring the future is not to be right—to make correct predictions. The goal is to get people to think and think more deeply about the future. So if you are working to get better understanding of how the world is changing and a broader focus on the future, don’t worry about being right, try to get people talking and reacting to new ideas. It’s ok to be wrong.

How can we be right by being wrong? We can get people thinking by provoking a response, by trying out an extreme scenario, and by exploring counter-views to the conventional wisdom. That, in fact, is probably the critical role of the futurist today. While we work hard to paint plausible portraits of the future, and to build a knowledgebase on change and strong skills in foresight, the base of our work is to catalyze thought.

Being faced with a new and different perspective—even one they think is wrong—gets people to think and raise their own views and assumptions. That is a victory because it is so rare in busy, stressed organizations. The response, “no, I think that’s wrong,” as long as it’s followed with “and here’s why,” is the conversation you want. And “yes but also…” is good to hear too.

Another great advantage of setting aside a concern about being wrong and being willing to share more speculative ideas is that it shows people you work with that they should be ready to try out ideas too.

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