Topics

• Foster a love of learning
• Empathy and the beginner’s mind
• The power of vision
• A beginner’s guide to visioning
• Harnessing change – a positive outlook

Foster a love of learning

At the age of 87 Michelangelo said: “I’m still learning”. Lifelong learning is certainly not a new concept but, whereas in the past most people would develop skills for their fixed career or role in life and then get by on that store of knowledge, it’s now widely agreed that to thrive in the future we must all foster a love of learning and ongoing growth. This is also true for the futurist. Working as a navigator of change means a state of constant transformation and, to stay abreast of this, you must constantly update your knowledge and skills.

A great futurist can be defined as an expert-generalist – someone knowing ‘a lot about a lot’. If you know ‘a little about a lot’, you are probably a generalist, or perhaps even a serial-specialist. That is perfectly good in many ways and how most futurists start out. With experience and training, you build up a knowledge base – internal and external – that helps you to decode signs and signals using the context of your existing knowledge and experience in your field of expertise.

This is also why we always ask the people we work with: “What do you already know about the future?”. It may well be that what they know is specialist to their field or industry, but does not extend to a more global perspective. Wherever they are on strategy and future planning journey, we need to listen carefully and take their starting point and base of knowledge into account.

The key to building knowledge as a futurist is to study widely across many topics and fields – summing up why you need to be a lifelong learner. But learning for futurists is not simply about acquiring knowledge from a wide field, it is also vital to acquire skills in learning transfer – taking what you learn in one context and applying it to another. In essence, to apply the knowledge, you must seek to understand the deeper principles that connect fields of study. This is a process that merges a creative leap with real insight and knowledge. Only through persistence and continual learning can this be honed and nurtured.

Empathy and the beginner’s mind

Imagination and empathy are two concepts that we consider as uniquely human. They allow us to step into other people’s shoes and see life from their point of view. To fully use the power of empathy, we must also try to assume a beginner’s mind. This means that we must try to shed all assumptions we have about a subject or – when engaging directly with people – any assumptions about their lives, values and viewpoints.

The concept of the Beginner’s Mind originated in Zen Buddhism. In this religious and philosophical context, it is is celebrated as a positive quality to cultivate. According to Zen Master Shunryu Suzuki, a beginner sees many possibilities while the expert only see few. In Zen practice, a Beginner’s Mind is also about trusting intuition and curiosity. Within trend forecasting, when we apply empathy and a beginner’s mind, we start seeing new connections and ideas emerge, or we get a new understanding of a certain behaviour or aspect of a thing. These are all insights that can add to our wider understanding of society’s change drivers and the challenges or opportunities they present. Ultimately, it help us become better at what we do and more open in how we see things.

Harnessing change – a positive outlook

We live in a time that is defined by complexity and volatility. Daily, we are faced with challenges as well as exciting possibilities. Our reality is accelerated by exponential change and, in order not to be overwhelmed, we need new tools to understand and anticipate future turns. This is why focusing on the positive aspects of a trend inspires a visionary outlook – cultivating a solution-oriented culture and innovation mindset. It also helps you become a resilient and active changemaker – confronting the winds of change by building windmills, not walls.

Being a futurist is about more than identifying trends; you need to explain the underlying drivers and know why they are important, and what the potential implications will be to the world at large. Future thinking and trends are starting to become a common language in businesses and organisations. As we have advocated for many years, trend management is a way to communicate more efficiently and rally people around a central purpose, expressed as a vision and contextualised by trends and future narratives (storytelling and storydoing). This is something most people can relate to.

Future awareness

The more future aware you are – knowing the past and present change drivers and society trends – the better equipped you are to influence and shape future developments and agendas. You need to dare to go beyond simply following trends to leading in a field – experimenting and innovating on the back of your futurist mindset and knowledge about tomorrow’s world.

You have a better chance of success when you cultivate the bigger picture and dive into what is going on in a current context. This enables you to understand the complex forces that may shape future developments in a local context or your field.