How To See Around Corners Like A Pro

(featured in the Cincinnati Business Courier )

What’s something all of us will do multiple times in the next hour?

Sure, breathing tops the list. And now, regrettably, checking our phones makes the cut too. But what else?

Though this list isn’t long, one habit is often overlooked: thinking about the future.

Truth be told, we’re obsessed with the future.

Case in point: Arnaud D’Argembeau and his research colleagues found most people think about the future 59 times a day—or once every 16 minutes during waking hours.

Innovators and strategists, for their part, have turned this obsession into a profession. For them, the future is a process to be managed, not a product to be received. They want to study it, shape it and, ultimately, seize it.

How can you do the same? How can you better manage yourself managing your future?

Start by making a clear distinction between predicting and forecasting.

In the 1980s, Philip Tetlock asked a cadre of experts in various fields to make thousands of predictions about the future. Twenty years later he evaluated their predictions. What did he find? The average expert was as accurate as “a dart-throwing chimpanzee.”

Predicting is like trying to stick a bullseye with a noodle. True, it’s possible to predict X will happen on Y date. But the odds of doing so are longer than long.

Forecasting, by contrast, uses data, analysis and strategy to anticipate the range of likely futures that may unfold. Ivana Milojevic, author of The Futures of Education, looks for “probable, possible and preferable futures.” It’s about contingencies, not certainties.

If you want to manage the future like an innovator and strategist, keep these five habits top of mind.

Think in questions, deal in probabilities. Break big questions into smaller ones, assigning weighted values of likelihood to each. The aim is to be wrong in tiny bites, not in massive chunks.?

Look back to see forward. The Kantar Futures Academy suggests studying history twice as far back as you plan to forecast forward. But be careful. The “fallacy of extrapolation” is the misguided assumption that a current trend will continue unchanged into the future. The past is a data point, not a divining rod. ?

Discern patterns, underlying connections, deep forces. In other words, think in tides rather than waves. William Gibson famously put it this way: “The future is already here, it’s just not very evenly distributed.”

Guard against confirmation bias. Treat your beliefs as under construction, update them early and often, and endeavor to be usefully wrong. For leaders, unwavering certainty avoids the charge of flip-flopping, but the capacity to change one’s mind in the face of better evidence should be a concise definition of wisdom.

See around corners. New Orleans has been called the impossible but inevitable city. Seeing around corners could be described in the same way. At first glance, it seems impossible to anticipate what the future holds. Yet, inevitably, someone figures out how to do just that, beating everyone else to the punch.

Nassim Taleb’s book The Black Swan takes its name from a phrase that for centuries meant an impossible thing. That’s because Europeans had never seen one. But Australians had, and when that darkness came to light, the phrase flipped to mean something unexpected, surprising.

If your team’s future thinking seems counterintuitive at first, trust you’re doing something right.

As the futurist Jim Dator explains, “Any useful statement about the future should at first seem ridiculous.”

The bottom line: All of us think about the future most of the time.

What separates innovators and strategists from the rest of the pack is their ability to convert this exercise from a mental habit to a competitive edge.

Seeing around corners is at the heart of the Cincinnati Futures Commission , an independent group of leaders who are building a farsighted strategy for the City’s future. Kudos to them for having the courage and the conviction to do this demanding work. Indeed, the future of our City’s identity and impact depends on it.?

Perhaps a character in the novel Utopia Avenue sums it up best: “The present is a curtain. Most of us can’t see behind it. Those who do see…change what is there by seeing.”

Ryan Hays is executive vice president and chief innovation and strategy officer at the University of Cincinnati. He is the author of Strategists First: How to Defeat the Strategy Trap