Welcome to The Everyday Futurist. My name is Tim Morgan. I am an award-winning expert in Strategic Foresight. The cooler title is “professional futurist”. What that means is that I study how things change and how those changes interact to create a future world that is different from today. I can’t predict the future. No one can. However, I can show you how we futurists explore paths the future can take and the best ways to explore each plausible future world.
We can’t do it for everything all at once. If we narrow to a specific “Future of” area, like say “Future of Suburban Housing” or “Future of K-12 Education”, then we can get a good sense of where we are going over the next 5, 10, or even 20 years. All of that is built on big piles of research data. We “scan” for both quantitative and qualitative research data to forecast longer-term possibilities. We analyze both existing trends and weak-signals of change to them (changes to the changes). We identify key drivers and uncertainties surrounding all those change indicators, based on how significantly they could shape future possibilities. We analyze all that and refine them down into collections of strongly interacting changes. Those are the most plausible alternative futures, each one distinct from the others.
Each alternate future gives us the ability to go even further, exploring the non-intuitive interactions and emerging changes that are likely to show up. It is like throwing rocks into a pond and watching the unique patterns when ones of different sizes are thrown in at different times.
The goal is simple: identify the most plausible futures, and figure out the best course of action we should take starting now. Where strategic planning stops, strategic foresight starts. Be it a desire to stay ahead on innovation and new markets, or addressing wicked problems like persistent poverty or pollution or just anticipating long-term customer needs, foresight gives people the tools to foresee plausible changes and plan for them. Futurists are spoil-sports. We want you to never be surprised. We are also like scouts. We want you to be prepared.
A futures study for a client is just a bunch of bits in a file if they don’t use it as a starting point for their short and long-term plans. If they do use it, with luck that combination of future-forward orientation and familiarity with foresight techniques eventually turns into what we call “Futures Thinking”. It is the blending of the expansive Big Picture view with the pragmatic Narrow Focus approaches. Futures Thinking is both art and science. It can be taught, but it must be practiced. Keep at it, and you can easily recognize the weak signals of change that shift trends, undermine industries, and open up new possibilities. Teaching futures thinking is the ultimate point of the game in Strategic Foresight.
So what’s in it for futurists (besides a paycheck). The best part of being a professional futurist is when we help people see a little farther and watch them open up to new possibilities. That is how we get a chance to make things better, and we love it.
This blog is to share that with you. We will explore some of the changes shaping our futures and how to think like a futurist on any topic, be it serious or silly. The dress code is casual.
Let’s go be Everyday Futurists together and see what’s just over the horizon.
Peace, love, & free tacos.
- Tim
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