How do you see your future?

Anticipating the future means looking at complex, interrelated events, and the underlying connections between them — not simply studying the temporary effects that they’re producing. Futurists focus on asking the right questions: What’s driving this declining trend? What’s fuelling its adoption? Start with some of the trends which I bring together in my annual Trend Kaleidoscope.

Signals

Pay attention to signals – they become your proof points – small developments happening on the margins that could scale over time. This might be a start-up in Sweden that is pioneering a new clean energy, like SSAB, or a consumer behaviour that is taking off, like mobile payments started with M-Pesa in Kenya.

Patterns

By aggregating signals and  how they connect to big picture trends, we can start to articulate patterns. Richard Watson always looks for the intersection of trends, where change is likely to multiply. Patterns need to be described, which may require new language.

Scenarios

We can look at the differences between alternative futures, their inherent risks and opportunities, and what is likely to drive each. Scenario planning becomes a powerful tool – which can be used in just a few hours, to prompt deep debate, and storytelling to bring it to life.

Choices

Strategy is ultimately about choices. Yes the world is more uncertain than ever, but that’s not an excuse not to make choices. You need to make some big choices – like your purpose, and overall direction – but also some agile choices – which may change overtime. A bit like climbing a mountain, you need to choose your peak, but be flexible in your choice of course as conditions change.

Communities

Bring more people with diverse perspectives together – from inside and outside your organisation. Look to parallel sectors going through similar changes. Look to technical experts, early adaptors, or deviant users, who can offer novel perspectives. And use a strong facilitator who can bring the viewpoints together but also challenge and propose new connections.

Business Futures Project

In the Business Futures Project, we consider how futures thinking plays a crucial role not just in developing strategies for the future, but organisation and cultural models for thriving in uncertainty.

• Future Shock, Alvin Toffler’s book remains one of the most influential texts written about the future,  showing how foresight thinking can impact our perspective in the present.
• Critical Path, by Buckminster Fuller, describes the factors that created the present world in the late 1970s – how to create a sense of urgency using forces, signals, trends and scenarios.
• Megatrends John Naisbitt’s 1982 identifies and explores ten basic trends that are now restructuring and redirecting American life, optimistically defining the changes – socially, economically, politically, and spiritually
• Imaginable Future forecaster and game designer Jane McGonigal draws on the latest scientific research in psychology and neuroscience to show how to train your mind to think the unthinkable and imagine the unimaginable
• How to Implement Strategic Foresight (and Why), Alberto Behar and Sandile Hlatshwayo’s overview of different foresight approaches and the way that foresight is used within the IMF.
• The Signals Are Talking: Why Today’s Fringe is Tomorrow’s Mainstream, Amy Webb describes a methodology for signal detection and trend identification
• Superforecasting, Philip Tetlock and Dan Gardner, using emerging signals to identify forces of change to predict answers to narrow questions using a probabilistic system.
• The Trend Forecaster’s Handbook, by Martin Raymond. This is a ‘how to’ book exploring the skills to understand and track trends and use them to inform research, design and product development.
• Rethinking strategy, by Steve Tighe, helps you use scenarios to envisage what your industry and organisation could look like in the future and prepare for what’s to come.