Strategy — map it out yourself

Five Ways To Envisage The Future

Of which four are not as good as the fifth

Did Charlie Chaplin love cinema? The question itself sounds absurd. A legendary movie star and filmmaker, he must have been in love with the art of cinema.

He was, but not always. In 1916 he said:

“The cinema is little more than a fad. It’s canned drama. What audience really want to see is flesh in blood on the stage.”

We all, not only Sir Chaplin, are lousy future forecasters for a simple reason:

• We all have our worldviews: mindsets, mental models, reality concepts

• We need them to feel safer in the complicated world

• Believing that the future will be different from today is painful because –

• It means that our worldviews are unreliable, and we feel insecure

That’s why we stick to our cozy mental models and believe that the world will never change.

But it will. Have you discovered something people have already been using for a long time? I have. Did you have a FOMO panic attack at that moment? I did. If you are a business person, a startup founder, or a manager who leads their organization, you need to have a concept of the future.

So, to think about tomorrow, we need to overcome our natural inability. Therefore, we need tools, and there are five of them.

To trust your intuition

As soon as we embrace the idea that tomorrow will be different from today, the way we think changes. Discussing future alterations with colleagues and partners can help sharpen our cognitive tools. Entrepreneurs love this approach and often trust their gut feelings.

Pros:

You don’t need any education or preparation to start anticipating the future.

Contras:

The world is a very sophisticated system, and it is difficult for an average person to see all the factors influencing ongoing development. Jeff Bezos, the Amazon founder, is a great visionary, but in 2014 the company presented its Fire Phone, but the idea turned out to be unsuccessful, and a year later, Amazon wrote off $170 million as a loss.

To ask industrial experts

We believe that industrial experts know more than ordinary people about specific domains. So, it seems reasonable to ask as many of them as possible about what is about to happen tomorrow. You can find many different experts’ consensus forecasts in the media.

Pros:

Experts and analysts get paid for studying the trends and change patterns, so their forecasts may be valuable.

Contras:

Experts are humans, and their thinking suffers from the same flaws as ours. They operate on facts, but facts are always about yesterday and today. As futurists often say, there are no facts about the future. Remember how many well-paid professional economists could predict the 2008 economic crisis?

To watch trends

There are many media, institutions, and people whose job is to watch trends, for instance, Trendwatching, Matt Klein, and many others. Their works’ deliverables are interesting and useful to read.

Pros:

Reading such reports may help you spot new trends and use them to leverage your business or launch a groundbreaking product.

Contras:

1. Even the best of the best can’t foresee a trend development. For instance, in 2016 Gartner, a reliable and respectful agency predicted that “by 2020, 100 million consumers will shop in augmented reality.” As we can see now, it hasn’t happened.

2. If a media or an institution calls something a “trend,” it is already a fact of reality rather than a future forecast. Your competition also read these articles. Can you use these ideas to outpace the competition?

To read since fiction

This is quite an exotic way to think about the future, but some foresight practitioners recommend it as well.

Pros:

Some writers can make predictions that will come true. For instance, in 1895, Jules Verne, the ‘father of science fiction’, predicted that shoppers in the future would view pictures of retail products on personal video screens and place written orders on a ‘teleautograph’ to be transmitted internationally via submarine cables.

Contras:

Science fiction writers are also humans, and “nothing human is alien to them.” In the famous Back To The Future saga in 2015, people have flying cars but don’t have cell phones.

To play foresight games

Foresight is a science; scientists help governments, social institutions, or large corporations create multiple long-term futures scenarios. Projects take months and are quite expensive, but the good news is that even small businesses can adopt these techniques for their needs and play foresight games. It is better to do it under the guidance of an experienced facilitator, but you can use one tool on your own.

But before we delve deeper into the process, it makes sense to say that foresight is not a tool helping “predict,” or “guess” the future, because it is unpredictable by nature. But foresight methods allow a team to think of tomorrow’s world in a structured and consistent way. The outcome of a foresight game is not a forecast expected to be detailed and accurate. Instead, it is a set of plausible and coherent possible future scenarios. We use these scenarios to envisage the future world we would like to live in. And then we can use them to create this world with our own hands.

1. Start collecting so-called “signals of change,” small, sometimes barely discernible signs of alterations in the world. What do people start doing differently than they used to? Don’t limit yourself to your industry, look more broadly. What technological, social, economic, and cultural changes do you see? Focus on minor, slight, unobvious changes that may (or may not) form our future. Involve your whole team in the process.

2. Make a collection of these findings and play a game with your team in which try to envisage a world of 2032, where all (or some) of them become true. What these tomorrow’s world will look like? Make up stories of two people living in this world. How do they work, live, learn, date, and take care of each other?

3. What will change in the world in 3–5 years if in 2032 it looks like you envision?

Don’t take this task too seriously, it is a game. Don’t try to predict the future — think of it. But if you do it this job well, you will get invaluable insights into the future, and they will help you make essential strategic decisions.

Pros:

You can create plausible and detailed scenarios of the possible future.

Contras:

It is difficult (but not impossible) to organize a foresight game without professional help.

If you want to learn more about foresight games, visit my webpage.