Imaginable: How to see the future coming and be ready for anything

Dator’s law is so fundamental to futures thinking that if you visit the Institute for the Future in Palo Alto, California, you will find it painted right on our front windows: “Any useful statement about the future should at first seem ridiculous.”

But hard empathy is easier to practice when you’re not just guessing, when you’re actually getting direct information from others about what they want and need. It can be as simple as asking two questions: What keeps you up at night when you think about the future? What makes you leap out of bed with excitement in the morning when you think about t

Within the next decade, “face search apps” will likely be as common as internet search engines are today. You’ll be able to get vast amounts of information about a complete stranger just by pointing your phone, smartwatch, or augmented reality glasses at them. Can you imagine how face searches will change your life? Can you imagine how your friends

Tool #4: How flexible and creative is your imagination?

This is how you become a pioneer. And it’s something I’ve seen again and again: it’s so much easier to come up with new innovations, to imagine new products and services and businesses and art forms, when you play with ridiculous, at first, ideas—because far fewer people are thinking about and getting ready for these “unthinkable” futures. You get

Experts say that roughly 50–60 percent of people who endure a trauma will go on to experience at least one area of post-traumatic growth.3 Paradoxically, the best predictor of post-traumatic growth is having experienced one or more symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. That’s because post-traumatic growth is not the opposite of suffe

you want to turn a signal into a scenario, the next step is to do a little analysis of the signals, by asking these questions: What kind of change is it an example of? What’s driving, or motivating, the change? Why is it happening? What does this signal make me worry about? What does it make me excited about? What would the world be like if the sig

RULE #7: Choose Your Future Forces. Make a list of the external forces beyond your control that are most likely to affect your life and your friends’ and family’s lives in the next ten years. Include things that make you excited for the future and things that make you worry. Use this list to keep an eye on the bigger picture. Be willing to acknowle

Instead of being drawn to people, information, and ideas that fit with your expectations, you become increasingly drawn to things that challenge your assumptions, that feel unusual or surprising in a way that can be unsettling or hard to understand at first.

make it a personal habit once a year to revisit the set of future forces that I’m most worried or most excited about. I do this yearly refresh in January, because that’s when the WEF’s Global Risks Report comes out.