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Candace Adorka
Digital marketer, videographer, unabashed slave to consumerism.

Curb Your Skepticism: A Journalist’s Guide to Future Thinking

If your mother says she loves you, check it out — with two independent sources.

This is one of the tenets drilled into me in journalism school at the University of Florida. I was taught to apply a healthy dose of skepticism to every presumptive fact scribbled in my notebook.

After all, you don’t want to be that reporter, unceremoniously chased out of the profession after your story has been debunked.

So, how is such a classically-trained journo supposed to react to the WorldFuture 2016 Summit?

Me on the final day of the summit, brain soaked with new-found knowledge.

What’s my skeptical brain to do with nuggets such as:

  • By 2035, 10% of cars worldwide will fully automated. #UbeRobo (you’re welcome, Uber).
  • “Othersourcing” of human labor goes beyond blue-collar manufacturing jobs. In the next 5 years, robots will do 25% of jobs with more cognitive requirements.
  • You’ll need to start thinking of data storage in terms of yottabytes, a.k.a. septillions, a.k.a. 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.
  • Where are you to store all that data? How’s about DNA? Or a single atom? I’ll let that percolate for a second (or a septillion?).
  • In the deep cyborg age, robotics will be so intimately integrated into the natural world, we’ll have to rethink our idea of “human.” For instance, if I upload my consciousness into the cloud, is it still me?
Poet Sekou Andrews’ hilarious initial reaction to the World Future Summit was similar to mine. General consensus was his Keynote address was everything! So was his jacket.

My brain melted.

Or at least it would have had I not first attended The Futures School Spotlight master class.

The 6-hour class was an introduction to Natural Foresight™. I think of Natural Foresight as a mental model that allows the future to inform the actions you take today.

Yvette and Frank — the dynamic powerhouse duo that teaches this concept — will tell you that Natural Foresight works best when you practice it in a ubiquitous way, allowing it to guide all your decision-making.

Frank Spencer and Yvette Montero Salvatico, the brains behind The Futures School, demonstrating the push vs pull of the future. P.S. You can’t sit through 6 hours with these two without laughter cramps. #bewarned

They say it should be the operating system of your organization, rather than an app you pull out when you think it’s needed.

A few take-aways from their talk:

  1. The point of foresight is not to have special access to a mystical crystal ball. Rather, it’s a way to build resilience and adaptability. That way, you’re optimally positioned for whatever future does unfold.
  2. Therefore, the outcome of the Natural Foresight process is a kind of map. You create a variety of scenarios extrapolated from patterns, trends, and issues emerging today.
  3. Then, you test your strategy/action/innovation against the various scenarios and see if you like the potential outcome.
  4. If not, maybe you should take different actions. If so, maybe additional actions can speed up the advent of the desired scenario. It’s a more advanced version of: “Wow, I’ve been spending a lot of time writing fictional stories (emerging trend). I could become a world-renowned writer when I grow up — that would be fun (future scenario). I should take this AP literature course to improve my writing and get through college faster (strategic action).”
  5. By planning this way, you can actually help create the future you desire.

Disclaimer: Natural Foresight is taught in an intensive 3-day hands-on workshop, so the above description is akin to scraping the very top of an iceberg with a scalpel. Baby steps, y’all. Baby steps.

Attending The Futures School master class gave me a framework to process information I may have otherwise dismissed as wild conjecture. That processing went as follows:

  1. The mind-blowing ideas I heard weren’t just copy-and-pasted from a sci-fi movie script; they were based on factual, quantitative information.
  2. What I heard was that particular futurist’s analysis and interpretation of that quantitative information. It’s a skill they’ve developed, not a supernatural power. Ipso facto, anyone can be a futurist.
  3. Anyone can be a futurist, provided he/she is willing to be open-minded — willing to challenge old assumptions and mental models.

The alternative is educated incapacity (my new favorite term). Educated incapacity is knowing so much about a specific area that you’re the last to see change coming.

If you don’t know, you betta ask somebody!

Specifically, ask someone who worked at Kodak, “How come digital photography led to your demise even though Kodak invented the digital camera?” #awkward

Educated incapacity is the new FOMO (Mom, that means Fear Of Missing Out).

Every good journalist has a bad case of FOMO, and unquenchable curiosity is the root cause. Aren’t you curious about what insights you are currently missing out on?

To my j-school friends:

Practicing foresight is an excellent way to keep your eyes on the horizon so that you’re first with the report on how a new technology, value shift, or emerging trend could affect your audience.

After all, isn’t it your job to be first with breaking news? Well here’s a breaking news tip — the future is happening, whether you have two sources to back it up or not. At least be aware of it so that you know where to look for those sources.

Don’t be the next Kodak — get your head out of the sand.

Learn more: http://www.kedgefutures.com/discover-tomorrow-create-today/