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How a Business Leader Can Think Like a Futurist
Advice from futurism consultants on how businesses can brace for the future
This is the time of year when we’re primed to look ahead. In recent weeks, you’ve probably laid out personal and professional goals, plans, and road maps for the next 12 months. And if you’re doing it on behalf of an entire company, you’re thinking even further into the future. Or at least you should be.
Even a year can feel like a lifetime away, especially when it’s hard to predict what will happen in the next quarter. But futurists, people who think and write about what’s to come, advise that CEOs need to be thinking years or even decades down the road.
Remember that the future doesn’t just happen — we shape it every day.
I interviewed three prominent futurists — Alexandra Levit, a partner at the consulting firm PeopleResults and author of Humanity Works: Merging Technologies and People for the Workforce of the Future; Mahrinah von Schlegel, executive director of the technology-focused nonprofit Embassy2.0; and writer Richard Watson, a lecturer at Imperial College London and author of the What’s Next report — about how business leaders can get themselves into a more future-oriented mindset.
Below, they explain how companies and the people running them can learn to predict the major shifts that could affect their operations — in technology, workforce, social trends — and how to adapt accordingly. Responses have been lightly edited for length and clarity.
MEDIUM: Let’s start with the basics. What does it mean to be a futurist?
Alexandra Levit: I’m not sure there’s an official consensus on the definition, but to me, being a futurist means paying attention to new patterns and trends that are slowly percolating up through the market or society that have the potential to catch on in a major way. It’s about coming up with possible scenarios for the future given these developments.
Mahrinah von Schlegel: A futurist is someone who aggressively predicts future trends, modes of operation, and ways of being, as opposed to people who are more focused on…
