How To Identify Your Greatest Future Opportunities

Summary: How do you truly identify where your greatest future opportunities lie? In this short video, I give a brief example of how to do this by exploring the impact of self-driving cars on one critical area of society.

Transcript: Hello and welcome to this week’s episode of Shaping Your Future. Before I get started I want to first thank you for all the responses to last week’s video on “how to explore the future of your industry.” The recurring theme in your responses was the desire to see a specific example of how this is done. Now, since these are short videos I will run through one example so you have a better idea on how to do this.

The first step in this process was to select an emerging trend or issue that could disrupt “business as usual for your industry.” So let’s take the issue of “autonomous vehicles” or self-driving cars. This could have significant implications on several industries so I thought this would be a good one to start with. The second step is to focus on society at large and away from your specific industry in order to create the context for your industry later. So if our issue is self-driving cars, we would start by asking a specific question like, 

“How might self-driving cars reinforce or redefine the concepts and ideas about the family unit?”  

Strange question right? But this is how we start to explore the potential implications a technology or trend may have on the future as a whole. So how do we answer that question? First we evaluate our present day relationship to cars or transportation and the role that plays in the family unit. Kids typically depend on mom and dad for transportation before they are able to drive and then, later they depend on mom and dad to borrow the car so they can drive themselves somewhere. There’s a progression from “dependence” to independence.” So then, how does the family unit function if the progression from dependence to independence is accelerated or eliminated altogether? 

You see, the point here is that in order to understand how the future may unfold we have to understand how a trend, issue, or event fundamentally impacts the key areas of our society. 

Technology, trends, and issues are not what shapes the future. It’s our response to those things that shape the future. What’s important here is to ask similar questions about other key areas like, public policy, religion, education, natural resources, the economy, and the list can go on. 

When you’ve explored how your trend or issue impacts key areas of society you then have the building blocks to create future context. It’s there you can begin to identify where the potential opportunities and obstacles for your industry truly lie. Now I know this is a quick example and I’m sure some of you will still have questions. That’s normal and I expect that. And with that in mind, I’m excited to announce that later this year I’ll be launching a comprehensive online course in collaboration with the University of Tennessee on how to anticipate change and capitalize on disruption. You’ll be hearing more about that as we get closer to opening the course for enrollment. 

In the meantime, if you’d like to be added to a select group of people to provide their feedback and thoughts on the course and content then please email me directly at, [email protected]. As always, I hope you found this to be of great value. Please share this on social media or send the url to someone who you think could greatly benefit from this as well. Alright, I look forward to seeing you next week.