How to Future

The best futurists I know are really keen historians and study the past to see the future. They look carefully at the past because most of what will happen tomorrow is already happening today.

Studying the past and its behavior gives us great insight into our future.

a good futurist spends a lot of time trying to decipher the present and to try to see it through the mask of present-day biases.

I sometimes think of “seeing the present” as trying on alien eyes; looking at the world as if I were an alien from another planet.

Trying to see beyond the immediate cycles of news is a challenge, because rather than being... See more

It is highly unlikely any scenario we make today will really happen on a 50-year horizon. Almost all our predictions at that scale will be wrong. The intent of this exercise is not to predict the future but to rehearse it. So when, if X does happen in 50 years, we can say, oh, we thought about that. And here’s what we should do.

to be helpful futuring, your imagination should be disciplined.

Ideally your imagined future would have a history. Whatever happens has to happen one-step at a time. So for every new technology or cultural innovation there needs to be versions that are economically viable one step at a time.

the game for the futurist is to try and imagine what led to... See more

It is often said that most futurists are really predicting the present. It turns out that the present is very hard to see. First the present is obscured by the noise of 8 billion lives looking for attention, and it is overwhelmed by the flashy glitter of the new. Mostly the now is obscured by our deep assumptions and prejudices which makes it very ... See more