Future cities by Leo Hidalgo via Flickr

By Thornton May
Futurist, Senior Advisor with GP, Executive Director & Dean - IT Leadership Academy

The year 2020 is very popular with the futurist tribe. Prior to a few years ago 2020 was thought to be a safe terminus for bold forecasts as it was perceived as being far enough in the future to avoid precipitating most “that will never happen” skepticism. If history teaches futurists anything it is that just about anything can – and does – happen. 2020 has the benefit of having an ophthalmologic double entendre. If you have 20/20 vision, you can see clearly at 20 feet what should normally be seen at that distance. Futurists if they do their job properly not only assist enterprises to see what they should see [i.e., future markets, future customers, future skill sets] but also to design actions in the present to prepare for what the future brings.

Authentic futurists do not make predictions, they induce preparations. If Cassandra, the tragically never believed daughter of King Priam and Queen Hecuba of Troy was a good futurist, her actions would have precipitated Troy to act prophylactically [i.e., convince the city fathers that it was not a good idea to bring that Greek Horsey thing inside the gates]. If she was a great futurist, Cassandra would have succeeded in getting the powers to be to act proactively [i.e., let’s find Paris – the son who eloped/absconded with Helen – a nice local girl to settle down with].

Some journalists have come around to treating predictions with a healthy skepticism. New media titan Adrianna Huffington, at the 2007 New Yorker Conference emphatically stated that, “You cannot predict the future.” The editorial staff at mainstream business publication Forbes advised, “When you get the urge to predict the future, better lie down until the feeling goes away.” [“The Future That Never Came,” Forbes, (10 July 1978), 51-52.] The strategy practitioner, scholar and co-author with Clayton Christensen of The Innovator’s Dilemma, Michael Raynor was unambiguous of his condemnation of prediction. “When it comes to making predictions for the purposes of strategic planning, we are pretty much wasting our time.”

Who among us has not been to a conference on the future of something which spent a great deal of time discussing predictions which were well off the mark? Who can forget the Maginot Line, Pearl Harbor, or the iconic “Dewey Defeats Truman” headline? Leafing through old copies of Popular Mechanics and Popular Science [great cover art] one discovers that in the 1950s, it was seriously predicted that by the year 2000 we’d all have atomic reactors in our basements and take our vacations on the moon. My foundational hypothesis as a futurist is that being “right” is less important than being “ready”.

Herein lies the tricky part. Ready for what? A simplified model of culture is what gets measured, what is made visible and what gets celebrated. I studied the words being used when organizations think about and prepare for the future. The term “future” can be a noun, an adjective or a verb.

In most cases, organizations treat the future as a noun – a specific place, a specific time and/or a specific value.

I believe that the organizations who will be best prepared in the future will be the ones which de-emphasize “future” the noun and focus on “future” the adjective and “future” the verb.