What is a futurist mindset?

Put at its briefest, a futurist is someone who spots trends by observing changes and analysing patterns. A futurist’s job is to suggest how trends could play out in the future and what impact the trends presented will have, be it at a personal, organisational, state or global level. Trends can be viewed as building blocks of the future – often presented as stories about tomorrow’s world and thus connecting the dots in various viable scenarios to inspire and guide vision and action. This is the job of the futurist.

Pinning down the mindset of a futurist is slightly harder to do. But often the starting point is something as simple as curiosity – asking the big ‘what, why, who, when, how’ questions about just anything – the universe, the planet, our society, organisations, people, etc. Futurists are curious by nature and they like to question the things accepted as norms/universal truths. However, curiosity alone takes you only so far. To think, work and play like a futurist, you have to be able to see weak signals, spot patterns, be analytical, but also intuitive, to see the connections and developments others might not see. The difference between a gifted trend spotter and a futurist is the ability to apply analysis, creativity and, what we call trend intelligence; constantly challenging the status quo in order to imagine an alternative path.

Philosophers operate very much like this – they use their skills to think about the world, the universe, our society and our role in it as humans. They often ask very basic questions about how we think, what it means to think, the nature of our universe or cosmos, and how things are connected. The ideas presented by philosophers are often general and abstract, yet concerned with the ‘big questions’; not dissimilar to the futurist’s way of thinking and the starting point of any trend management project.

How to activate new thinking

For inspired thinking to happen, you have to develop your futurist skills on an ongoing basis – we call this lifelong learning – using the right tools and models to help you systematically identify, analyse and communicate the trends and their impact in your context. At Kjaer Global, we call this trend management and we have developed a practical toolkit and methodology to enable the process. This is underpinned by systems and design thinking and has been refined in close collaboration with our clients over many years in ongoing future vision work and projects.

A futurist works in an iterative process, so the right tools are crucial to being structured and analytical, but also allow room to be playful and creative. In addition, developing the right habits or even rituals enables you to continually grow and evolve your futurist mindset. A great deal of this is about discipline and good routines, but it is also about boldness, intuition and empathy. In this module we will explore this more in depth and in the next module WORK, we will tap into the core thinking and traits of some great futurists throughout time.

Finally, it is not enough to just know about the trends and drivers, you also need to activate them in various contexts and situations. When you develop a way to understand how trends evolve, and how they can be responded to, managed and used to your advantage, you start to develop and refine your own skills and approach to the future.

Illustration from the study, The Limits to Growth 1972 by The Club of Rome

It can be difficult to separate and understand the different branches of forecasting. Many forecasters are not so much forecasting as ‘tracking’ trends. They are so called ‘trend hunters’ – observing lifestyle trends as they manifest at a moment in time. This is a somewhat intuitive way of looking at trends, involving light cultural analysis that can mostly be used to indicate how a ‘style’ or a material trend may develop in a short time frame of one to two years.

At Kjaer Global, we work with trends on a deeper, more holistic level. We go beyond asking what, where and when – expanding our vision and exploration into the context of the why and how of things. This enables us to see and understand how trends potentially will evolve, across both the short and long-term.

In short, we do not just do trend spotting or trend forecasting because we have already a developed trend management framework to take the work further. This framework is a systematic approach to identifying, understanding and activating trends, and we will discuss how this works in later lessons

Once you have a trend management system, you can refine how you work with trends and use them as essential building blocks within your specific context or industry. Identifying and analysing trends and observing new movements becomes so much easier with a good system, and allows you to use trends in a multitude of ways.