Futurecasting

The great thing about being a futurist is that by the time the future rolls around, no one remembers what predictions you made about. Or at least I comfort myself with that thought. The reality, as I had to teach my 16 year old, is that the internet is forever.

Experts have predicted 15 of the past 3 recessions

It's always dangerous to be in the prediction business if anyone actually looks back and checks what you've predicted. After all, the future is an intrinsically uncertain place. We live in a Bayesian universe but people want certainty and so we futurists must place a stake in the ground and make confident assertions. But every once in a while, you get it right, as Mikael Pawlo kindly pointed out

2016 was a heady time, as Alex 'Sandy' Pentland and I were in the midst of running the first-ever graduate fintech class in North America and launching the online version as well for MIT. My esteemed colleague and battlefield buddy Simon Chantry was kind enough to dig up this chart showing that, at least in this case, my sense-making was on target

Look at that - virtually nothing in 2016, but what we could glean from talking to people.

Which brings me to the point of this article: how exactly do we predict the future? I teach my students Futurecasting as part of our work on startups, because a startup can be thought of as a confident prediction about what the world will look like in 5 to 7 years.

A startup is a confident prediction about the future.

What's involved in Futurecasting? I like to adapt a McKinsey strategic planning exercise as a base framework.

• Current State. First, we catalog the current state of affairs of whatever domain we're investigating, exploring the good, the bad, and the ugly.
• Future State. Then, we imagine 5 to 10 years into the future. Let's pretend that all problems are solved. Imagine we have leading market share, or a world without hunger, or what have you. What does that new reality look like?
• Transition Path. Finally, we do the messy mapping of how to get from point A (the current reality) to point B (the new Utopia).

When I implement this as part of an engagement with an institution or a government in my advisory business, Visionary Future , there's an added dimension of sense-making.

I didn't just wake up one morning and create a multi-billion-dollar digital learning category, and completely reshape the business model for online for top-tier academic institutions. When I struck the initial deal between Getsmarter (now 2U) and MIT in 2015-2016, I didn't envisage that seven years later, edX would be sold to 2U for $800 million off of the back of that relationship.

What I had done, however, was two years of painstaking groundwork from 2013 to 2015, investigating the state of the world in digital learning. I did a rigorous assessment of MIT's current digital learning profile and business model, as well as faculty competencies and domains where MIT would be a 'natural owner' of a market. (For example, despite the fact that 80% of MIT students have concert-level music skills, you wouldn't automatically look to MIT for musical training. You would go to Berklee or Julliard. Julliard, where my nephew went for classical trombone, is a 'natural owner' of music education).

This taught me that there was a gap in the market, and a meaningful desire for expertise and skills from MIT in certain domain spaces. I had some intuitions, which are always helpful, but needed to conduct a more thorough market investigation, investigate ground truth, talk to thought leaders, explore current needs and extrapolate trends.

Walking into the negotiation with Getsmarter/2U, and standing up the first global fintech accelerator MIT Future Commerce, I had in my pocket two years of research on what was needed and why. I knew it would be interesting, even if none of us imagined how big it would get and how quickly. My prediction of the future was informed by extensive field work.

What's coming next?

Now that I'm taking a victory lap, you might ask me, what's coming next? I can share that I'm cooking up some new predictions about the impact of artificial intelligence on the nature of work and on different industries like financial services, management consulting and healthcare. Stay tuned for more futurecasting...

PREORDER NOW! The metaverse is coming...

This article does not necessarily reflect the views of Imperial College Business School, ADEX, or any of the organisations with which I am affiliated. My disclosures of investments and advisory clients are listed at www.VisionaryFuture.com .