What is a Futurist? You can describe or contextualise the future in many different ways.
Some people consider the long-term future, while others consider the short-term future. Some focus on technology, others on strategy, and others on people. All of these are valid, but I will talk a little about my approach.
Whenever anything is uncertain, we become sceptical and anxious about it, and as I’ve been on my journey as a futurist for the last 15 years, what I talk about has evolved. I began by talking about technology and strategy, and I soon realised that, more often than not, people weren’t changing their behaviour. By evolving myself, I realised this was the most important part. If you don’t change your behaviour, you can’t change the strategy; you are still anxious and not fully invested. When you can shift the way you think about uncertainty, all of it becomes incredibly exciting because you start to see opportunities.
The first thing we have to do is simplify the future. An interesting quote is, “Complexity is the enemy of complexion”, which means that when something is so complex and therefore uncertain, we don’t execute on it. Instead, we distort and ignore it because we can’t deal with it. So, to simplify the future, we need to be exposed to it as often as possible – five to ten minutes a day is enough – and that way, we can familiarise ourselves with its language.
The second thing you must do is realise you cannot solve a problem with the same awareness that created it. As humans, we have an awareness that’s been drilled into us by the Industrial Revolution, and this has made us addicted to the ideas of efficiency and profitability. Awareness is just another way of saying personality. And personality is made up of three things: how you think, act, and feel. Neuroscience has proven that we have between 60,00 and 80,000 thoughts a day, of which 90 per cent are reoccurring thoughts, meaning that we never change how we think or act or feel, so we never change our awareness and never see any new opportunities.
So, the skill of adaptability and letting go of one’s identity to develop a new one becomes by far the most important thing you can do because people educated during the Industrial Revolution don’t want to see other solutions ahead of them, and their awareness doesn’t give them the opportunity to see them. We can see this worldwide, with companies whose awareness has prevented them from looking to the future and they are now falling behind their competitors.
Once we have simplified the future by exposing ourselves to it as often as possible, we will start to become comfortable with it. The next job is to elevate our awareness to become more adaptable, letting go of our identity to develop a new one. This is not a simple process, but it can be achieved through meditation and healing your past, which will start to rewire your brain.
The third thing you need to do is restructure yourself and your organisation. Very often, when it comes to businesses, we will ask existing people to do the work for today AND the work for tomorrow, but the issue is that those people don’t understand tomorrow.
The three pillars of the way I believe I’ve become the fifth futurist in the world is, the process that I follow of simplifying, elevating and restructuring is very important. Whereas, I think many other futurists try to simplify the future. This can lead people to become worried and scared about the future.
What you need to do is change yourself for the future. In your own business, you need to start thinking like a futurist, and remember that what a CEO is supposed to do is bring more opportunities and efficiency to its business. It wasn’t ever about exploring new business opportunities. I believe that what a CEO used to be, should become a COO, and the CEO now must start to imagine new possibilities. Not focusing on existing opportunities. Or you can have Co-CEOs to think in that way. If you can’t afford to have a Co-CEO or that’s not the way the structure of your business is set up, what are you doing to simplify the future for your decision-making process? And what are you doing to shift your awareness and restructure? If you’re not doing all three of these, you will become irrelevant. There are many global businesses that this has already happened to because they didn’t prepare.
So, as a futurist, my main aim is to help you relax about the future. To be optimistic about the future and to act like you’re already in the future. And if you don’t do those three things, you can’t actually engage with the future in the way that you need to.
In order to engage with the future, you must spend time in the future each day. This could be through podcasts, reading, or watching videos. The way I personally learn is by walking and listening to podcasts, but everyone has their own way. The point is; do something because most people are doing nothing, and if you do nothing, that shows that your awareness is stuck in yesterday. We must all develop curiosity about what’s coming rather than fear. When you fear it, you are keeping the future complex. In order to simplify it, you must be exposed to it.
