Origin Story
I get asked what a Business Futurist is or does on occasion. It’s usually out of pure curiosity, but sometimes also comes with a tinge of a disparaging tone. Surely that's not a real thing.
The field of futurists and futurism is not a household term…yet. But naming myself one before people were familiar with the term is exactly what a real Futurist™ would do.
I didn’t coin the term myself, which makes me feel better about it. That credit goes to my friend Adam. Some might say Adam has a gift for seeing peoples authentic selves when they can’t yet. In fact this is probably why many years later he now has a booming executive coaching practice.
I remember it like it was a decade ago. We had been walking around the city aimlessly on a sunny afternoon, beverages in hand, talking philosophy for hours and at one point I remember him saying, “I know what you are, you’re a Business Futurist”, and just like that, I was.
Once I heard it, it clicked. Yes, I was that for sure. And I’ve called myself - at least on LinkedIn, that ever since. Through all job titles and consulting gigs I take on, I will at my core always be a business futurist. My friends and family not on LinkedIn may not be familiar with this term so let this this first post serve as my coming out.
When people ask, I still struggle to articulate what a ‘Futurist’ is entirely, but the ‘Business’ part meshes well with my commerce degree and entrepreneurial background. Its the fusion of these terms that’s important and unique, and thats because it’s endemic to who I am and what I’ve been doing for the now majority of my life. It’s kind of about living on the boundary layer of what’s possible, where society is going and where new technology intersects. It’s about experimenting with new concepts and generally it’s where discovery really happens. As part of the natural course of my career, I’ve found myself working on or with nearly every trend that becomes the next “big thing” usually 5 years or so after I’ve moved onto the next thing.
At its core the moniker of Business Futurist is my personal brand of business consultant, one that functions to help guide organizations in an executive capacity, primarily weighting the tools of foresight strategy and intuition with all the classical industry and market analysis you would expect.
What you come out of it with will vary depending on engagement and scope but you will always have a plan, and a direction to go in that will harden your company, and for some it could be the difference between flourishing in the near future & many years to come or not existing at all.
My business futurist ways will only continue to evolve and take new forms as I add new tools, and frameworks to draw from and work on new businesses, helping them develop products and services, get to market or set them on a trajectory to grow for the next ten, twenty years or even hundred years.
The History Lesson
Future Studies comes from the 1970s when the oil crisis happened and the whole world was very economically uncertain, some bright execs for the oil companies started to wonder why they didn’t have a plan B, or even a predictive model for what to do in case of such a crisis. From that harrowing financial event came Scenario Planning. This was essentially the birth of modern day Foresight Strategy which is at the core of the field of Future Studies.
As it turns out the field of Future Studies is actually quite relevant, not only to business, but also where major policy comes from that informs large institutions like finance, health, and banking. You can’t name any two or three letter acronyms for large influential multinational orgs like the, UN, WEF, WHO, who haven’t been influenced by thought leaders and think tanks in the fields of futurism.
Current State
There are many think tanks like the excellent Fork in the Road Project whose missions are inspiring, and in general would make life on earth better. With these goals in mind, the aforementioned two and three letter organizations are able see further into the future and plan with more detail and precision for ways to deploy their funding and execute their mandates to build a better and more efficient, organized society. Government policies around the world are similarly informed by Futurist think tanks.
Canada has it’s own institute called Policy Horizons Foresight. I was lucky to speak with Canada’s Chief Futurist, Peter Padbury who’s a trailblazer and has developed a world class framework that moves the entire field of Scanning and Foresight forward. One area we touched on during our very first conversation was the tendency for think tanks to fall prey to group think.
Group think happens within all cultures, but when it comes to envisioning the future, it seems there’s a “disaster aversion” meme that’s taken control of many think tank narratives. Useful as it is to plan for avoidance of inevitable disaster, I believe that there’s more to be gained from blank slate visioning of what improvements are needed and could yield geometrically more positive results.
Part of this knee jerk reaction to fixate on negative data and trends is a very human trait for triaging danger, but another intangible piece of this puzzle is a deeper lack of philosophical placement and meaning in the general zeitgeist just sort of going along with whatever comes their way.
I’m speaking to a meandering attitude in the mainstream media that lacks purpose. You can sense that life meaning beyond the surface level is a struggle for so many in this current TikTok era.
Kony 2012 anyone?
The apathy of the social media age probably stems from a protective mechanism in our brain to buffer the rise and fall of ‘trends’ well crafted viral video can create to their sobering reality the very next moment.
After a dozen years of this, and a news media that’s become increasingly monotonously alarmist, it’s not hard to see where some of this nihilism is coming from.
I theorize that this will improve as decentralization progresses and we move away from external locus of control web 2.0 to a more internal locus of control with web 3.0. The psychological shift with the technology has the potential to be deeply empowering.
Back to the Future
My love of the future comes from my love of science fiction of all variety, a free roaming imagination, an insatiable curiosity about the world around me and a deeply engrained wish for humanity to succeed. I look to the greats of the brilliant and practical like Bucky Fuller who showed where we could go in a lifetime to the masters of fiction like Isaac Asimov who could project their mind out thousands of years forward to bring back stories. They did all this from an era that didn’t even have the internet. Unreal
Speaking of which, I’m looking forward to watching the Apple produced take on Asimov's masterpiece ‘Foundation’. This material if able to convert well to the medium of our time will put the idea of science based prediction of future events into the mainstream.
Will Hari Seldon and the concept of psychohistory become like the dragons in Game of Thrones, something nerdy that became cool enough to discuss at the dinner table?
If you aren’t familiar with the storyline of Foundation, it’s scope is truly immense but the core of it is about being able to predict events based on the past and projecting the psychology of every being into the future to build a sort of mathematical decision tree model that accurately predicts the outcome of entire galactic empires spanning thousands of years - its pretty cool (to me) and I’m hoping the show is as great as the source material.
As for this new substack, stay tuned, I’m just getting started and I’ll be continuing some of these topics from my old blog and this new one in subsequents posts.