Five Lessons I’ve Learnt During My Time as a Futurist
After learning the ropes of foresight for more than a year, I have found that lessons on foresight can often be buried in obfuscate journal articles or conveyed in expensive master classes. So I thought I’d made them more widely available via this more accessible medium (pun not intended).
Towards a working definition
Because there are wide ranging definitions of foresight, I find it necessary to develop a working definition for purposes of this article. Foresight (more specifically strategic foresight) is the practice of developing insight on the future and helping organisations better anticipate the long-term future, which is particularly pertinent in an environment of uncertainty. The goal of practicing foresight is to help organisations make better decisions amidst uncertainty. Today, foresight is practised by the likes of global governments (e.g. Singaporean Government’s Centre for Strategic Futures and Canadian Government’s Policy Horizons Canada) and MNCs (e.g. Shell and Disney).
Developing alternative versions of the future allow us to adapt to prospective change (e.g. shift resources appropriately) and develop resilient capacity (e.g. hold spare financial buffers for rainy days). Because the future pans out in non-linear pathways, we need to go beyond economic forecasts to explore possible trajectories of the future.
Scenario planning helps us develop these alternative stories of the future. For example, scenario planning helped Shell prepare for the eventuality of the 1973 oil crisis. People struggle to sometimes empathise with these scenarios that may be so different from the current context, so sometimes we need immersive games to help people internalise these futures.
An aside — “tech foresight” is often confused with “strategic foresight”, even thought their objectives may differ. Tech Foresight or Tech forecasting brings together scientists, businesses and governments to identify areas of research and technologies that will yield greatest value for society. It relies on data driven methods like patent analytics and bibliometrics, and some tech foresight involves developing conjectures on what technologies will be disruptive and what the adoption curve will look like. So, it should be understood separately from strategic foresight.
Studying trends helps to minimise the unknowns and address the knowns in the longer term environment.
To quote Donald Rumsfeld in 2002, in the wake of 9/11:
“There are known knowns. These are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns. That is to say we know that there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don’t know we don’t know”.
Let’s break this down:
- Known knowns — we are not concerned with those that we already know and are dealing with. Rather, we are concerned with black elephants, i.e. what is staring us in the face but we fail to adequately deal with. These black elephants emerge often as a result of our own cognitive biases. For instance, organisations with a bias towards engineering may neglect softer aspects. (It was previously pointed out that Singapore’s SMRT system failures may indirectly be attributable to HR).
- Known unknowns — these are the uncertainties that we can know if we seek them out. These are issues that we know are pertinent, but that we are not familiar with. Deeper examination of the implications of known unknowns is required.
- Unknown unknowns — these are highly unfamiliar events or black swans, in the words of Nicholas Nassim Taleb. Constant scanning of the horizon of events can help us identify potential wild cards that can come our way.
In brief, the role of horizon scanning is to prompt organisations to address the known knowns, make sense of the known unknowns, and scout for the unknown unknowns. (Different organisations have different definitions of the above terms, so the above is the best effort at understanding it. Please refer to this speech by Senior Advisor of the Centre for Strategic Futures Mr Peter Ho for further reading on this).
Here are five short lessons I’ve learnt during my time practising futures.
First, as Tim O’Reilly mentioned in his book “WTF: What’s the Future”, a good futurist will need to be aware of his map of the future. To me, knowing the map involves situating global developments in time and space.
How do you carve your problem space? Who are the actors in your space?
What are the latest developments or signals in that problem space? Where are these developments taking place — are they sporadic, resembling a domino effect or spreading across the world? How have these developments mirrored/ departed from history?
O’Reilly argued that the outdated maps of the computer industry caused Microsoft’s shares to stumble. He argued that conversely, the rise of the open source software movement provided a map that triggered the rise of new platforms like Amazon and Google.
Personally, one of the flawed maps that I believe we all remain wedded to is the industrial system of time and work. Most work and school still remains structured around a 9-to-5 timetable. Yet with the increasing proportion of gig work and automation of work, the question of how work should evolve should be examined more deeply. This should also affect our employment classifications, employment contracts and social security options, which Governments around the world have yet been able to fully grapple with.
The problem of education is a particularly acute one. MOOCs have provided a greater array of options for children, and educators have shifted towards the Dewey method of “learning by doing”, but most schools around the world still deliver information in classrooms for students to imbibe, download (sometimes over the internet) and regurgitate.
Second, be aware of your mental model of the future. Since you have a job of helping people become more open minded, you need to first know your own assumptions. I urge you to deeply examine yourself and your views towards your organization, through questions like these:
What is your world view? What is your life goal? If you can live forever, would you and why?
What does your organization exist for? If you think your organization could do one thing better, what would that be? What can be the worst thing that could happen to your team?
Third, be clear on why you and your organization are doing futures, and what it means to do it well. Futurists sell ideas and stories, so it is important to clearly define the goal and audience for these scenarios, lest we lose focus.
Futures teams need a clear mission statement. Arthur Brooks, the President of American Enterprise Institute, noted that many think tanks have vague mission statements, e.g. “we produce high quality research”. The more specific the moral mission is, the easier it will be for researchers who work in the think tank to align their writing in line with that mission. In contrast, the AEI’s mission reads like this “ The American Enterprise Institute is a public policy think tank dedicated to defending human dignity, expanding human potential, and building a freer and safer world. The work of our scholars and staff advances ideas rooted in our belief in democracy, free enterprise, American strength and global leadership, solidarity with those at the periphery of our society, and a pluralistic, entrepreneurial culture.”
Futurists also need to clearly define the metrics for success. While it is difficult to develop direct measures in a marketplace of ideas, one may develop proxy measures in relation to stakeholders. In AEI’s case, the proxy measure used was the total number of op-eds published in the most competitive news outlets. If you work in an even more uncertain environment, one may prefer more qualitative measures like how many outlandish ideas the team managed to gain traction on (closely related to the idea of shifting the Overton window).
What is your futures team’s mission? What are some metrics for its success?
Fourth, foresight is best practiced when it combines foresight tools (e.g. scenario planning, horizon scanning) with deep knowledge of various domains.
- Complexity science is especially useful because the world is complex and actors interact in non-linear ways.
- Psychology or Behavioural science helps futurists become more aware of their own and their organization’s cognitive biases.
- Humanities or Social sciences helps us understand social and human phenomenon.
- History especially, because as David Staley describes in this wonderful paper “The History of the Future”, the thought process of the scenario method shares many features with historical thinking. Specifically, he noted that historians and futurists alike know that surprise is the rule rather than exception, and context matters.
- Natural sciences is especially helpful in helping us understand science and technological change. I find the scientific method also helpful in informing the way futurists test their assumptions.
… there are many more useful disciplines, so the above list is by no means exhaustive.
What academic disciplines can provide useful ways of thinking about the problem at hand?
Fifth, because foresight requires us to be open minded towards various versions of the future, the pictures we paint are much more realistic if they reflect the voices of many.
The cyberpunk writer William Gibson once said that “The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed”. So the next time people tell you that the future in the next 20 years is all about the singularity, please remind them to think from the perspective of the average human.
The problem of having “Futures” steered by the elite is particularly acute because futures practitioners, particularly technology futurists, tend to be practiced by those who can afford to plan for the long term (e.g. Elon Musk, Dubai Futures Foundation).
This means that engagement is a vital skill that futurists must hone. Futurists need to learn to ask good questions, facilitate discussions and create a safe space in which people can discuss the wackiest ideas (e.g. artificial wombs, resurrecting a woolly mammoth), They need to learn not just to listen, but incorporate these people’s views into the stories we tell about the future. Only then will the stories we tell about the future not be emerging from one lens , but from a myriad of viewpoints.
How can you bring various parties into this futures conversation?
Finally, SURPRISE! If you are ready to embrace multiple versions of the future, then chances are you are already practising some form of futures.
My biggest hope is for the democratisation of foresight — that it will provide a tool for us all to keep an open mind to the possibilities that this world can bring us.
Disclaimer: Talitha still thinks about the future but is no longer a full time futurist. This blog post reflects her own views and not that of the organisations she has worked for.
