5 Benefits of future thinking

Illustration by Ariel Davis

Here’s a bold prediction… in 10 years Strategic Foresight will be business as usual. Companies will look to their Foresight department to deal with what Alvin Toffler called Future Shock. The methods and practice of futures thinking will go mainstream in the way design thinking has today.

I may be biased, but I sure hope I’m right. Why? Because I honestly believe foresight prepares you to be a better person, and more strategic leader. The world would be a better place if we had more foresight.

With that in mind, here are five key benefits of futures thinking:

1. It strengthens your mental flexibility and reminds you that anything can change. This flexibility will be increasingly important in coming decades as we are forced to adapt and innovate around things like the climate crisis.
2. It gives you an edge and helps you anticipate changes that others might have a hard time spotting. The more you practice the more you start to see connections between disparate signals and trends.
3. It hones your empathy because to build plausible futures you have to understand how people think and act, and what their hopes and fears are.
4. It teaches you practical skepticism. So when someone makes an overstated claim about driverless cars you can push back based on your assessment of what needs to happen in order to get to that future. This could include everything from technological innovation to regulation and the psychology of handing over control to the “computer”.
5. Last, but not least, is it gives you hope. Something that I think we need now more than ever.

“Hope just means another world is possible, not promised, not guaranteed. Hope calls for action; action is impossible without hope.” — Rebecca Solnit

To be a futurist means to consider a range of possible futures, some that are more utopian and others that are more dystopian. I find that act of imagining different futures to be an inherently hopeful act.

It means that you can envision more than just probable futures. And if you can do that then you can start to think about what your preferable future is and how to take action to get there.

Remember, the future is not handed to us, we each play some part in creating it. What part will you play?

Illustration by Ariel Davis