Institute For The Future

One thing I wish I had known when I was just beginning my futures practice….

None of us are born expert futurists. We all start as beginners, and even after years of practice, there's more to learn. So, what's one piece of advice you wish someone had shared with you as you were starting your journey into futures thinking? We asked IFTF staff to share at least one nugget of wisdom they wish they had had in their back pocket as they were newly developing their foresight skills. Budding foresight practitioners, take heed!

• The goal of foresight isn’t to know what will happen, but rather to create opportunities, as an individual or organization, to grow your resilience and adaptability to change, and be not only more prepared, but also uncover valuable self-knowledge in the process. - Toshi Anders Hoo, IFTF Emerging Media Lab Director

• Don’t be afraid to be uncertain. Lean into asking questions and collaborating with others to build shared understanding and imagine possible futures. - Vanessa Mason, Research Director, IFTF Vantage Partnership

• Your goal shouldn’t be to show how much stuff you know; your goal should be to help your audience see the connections between the things they already know. - Jamais Cascio, IFTF Distinguished Fellow

• The goal is not to come up with the perfect forecast—the very process of building foresight improves the ability to anticipate the future. - Daria Lamb, IFTF Ambassador to the Future
  
  
• You’re going to be wrong with your forecasts—but you should try to be usefully wrong.  - Jamais Cascio, IFTF Distinguished Fellow

• Don’t worry about getting the ‘right’ forecast/scenario. Instead focus on the conversation and the insights that result from the provocation. - Sean Ness, IFTF Business Development Director

• Find critics you trust. Knowing that they will give you constructive feedback unleashes your creativity and frees you from having to second-guess yourself. Otherwise, you can find yourself endlessly agonizing over whether or not your forecast ideas are any good, especially when you’re too new to even know what makes a good forecast. - Ben Hamamoto, IFTF Research Director

• Futures thinking is hard, harder than you think. People are often inexperienced doing it, and working under various cognitive biases and stressors. Be patient, use examples, and help them feel the future so that they can think the future. - Jake Dunagan, IFTF Research Director

• Trust the process, and make sure you’re giving each step room to breathe. By that, I mean - don’t default to just thinking about solutions or opportunities. Those are useful ways to imagine what the future could look like, but they often rely on our inherent understanding about what the problems are, today. The problems of the future could be wholly different though - and that’s what’s important to really explore. - Wayne Pan, IFTF Research Director

• Clarity is more important than certainty. - Bob Johansen, IFTF Distinguished Fellow

• Looking future-back is easier than looking present-forward. - Bob Johansen, IFTF Distinguished Fellow

• The most interesting learnings from futures work often emerge from thinking about the unintended, downstream, and/or second or third-order consequences of “preferred futures.” - Rachel Maguire, IFTF Research Director

• A question alone can sometimes be a revelation. - Mark Frauenfelder, IFTF Research and Editorial Director

• Set things up so the client arrives at an insight. Give them the nudge to form their own aha! moment. - Mark Frauenfelder, IFTF Research and Editorial Director

• Thinking about the future, and specifically ourselves in the future, triggers the same part of the brain as when you think of a stranger. We’re strangers in our own future. - Susanne Forchheimer, IFTF Emerging Media Lab Research Manager

• One of the things that would have been particularly helpful for me early on is a list of reliable sources for trend data. For example: Brookings Institute, PEW Research, NBER, Federal Reserve. There are often other sources of interesting data, but it’s good to be able to quickly recognize trustworthy sources. - Kathi Vian, IFTF Distinguished Fellow