5 things you can do to think like a futurist

Intent on beating the retailers at their own game, and seeing as New Year’s is the natural holiday for futurists, today we’re going to leapfrog both Thanksgiving and Christmas to start dispensing advice for the New Year!

And so here are five things you can do to think more like a trained futurist*.

Scan.  Scan, scan, and scan some more.  Trained futurists engage in a continual exercise classically known as environmental scanning.  For us it’s like breathing.  Find and flip through a lot of news and developments.  This isn’t classic research; it’s more like dipping your face into the fire hose.  Over time you’ll get a sense of patterns and shifts emerging out there in the world.  This is the raw info feed about the world from which trained futurists continually refine their notions of the nature of the possible.  It is from here that we typically pull the weak signals that we weave together into emerging issues.

Diversify Your Sources.  Whether you’re engaged in scanning or conducting more in-depth research, diversify your information sources and go farther afield to sniff out developments that might be important.  When scanning, this helps us identify emerging issues arising outside of classic industry/sector boundaries that might drive change that is in fact relevant to our concerns.  When doing research or even strategy development, the experiences, perspectives, and frameworks from outside of our concerns can often provide a breakthrough, through reframing or simple inspiration.

See the World Systemically.  Always ask yourself about connections, about the relationships that bind what you’re looking at with many other things in the world.  Think about upstream drivers and downstream effects.  Think about first, second, and third order impacts.  See the world around you as a web, see the strings of that web vibrate as feedback ripples around you.  Try thinking and note-taking in pictures, in diagrams that connect actors with each other and that link causes with effects with further effects, with even further effects.  And think about complexity: about how inputs don’t always relate to outputs; about sudden, unexpected shifts in the system; and how unexpected patterns can emerge from the undirected interactions of lots of individual actors…

Swing Both Ways.  Regularly alternate between deep dives into the work of great scholars and intellectually rigorous conceptual frameworks and the surface-skimming, social network-sampling activities of scanning.  Theory and mental models matter, so do not ignore them.  Always forecasting the futures of complex issues based solely on intuition and gut feeling is a poor practice.  At the same time, you need to draw upon your intuition and the capacity of your mind to see something entirely new.  Moving back and forth between these two approaches will keep your mind fresh while challenging it to always be rigorous and self-critical.

Be Humble.  Remind yourself that you don’t actually know how the universe works…

*recall: trained futurists are fundamentally dealing with the issue of change in society...