Keep your eyes peeled in the now for glimpses of the future

When you immerse yourself in a particular career or specialisation there is always the possibility that everything takes on a hue that mirrors that reality. You become closely attuned to the jargon, you walk the talk, and you find the comfort of confirmation bias around every corner. Or, as the perspicacious business director of the Gordon Institute of Business Science in South Africa told me some years ago: If you rely day in and day out on the particular tools of your trade - in his case marketing - then “everything looks like a marketing hammer”.

Freshly armed with a shiny new certification in Futures Studies (thank you Stellenbosch Business School) I was fully expecting to ‘see’ things through fresh eyes and with a more future-focused approach than I had before being exposed to Sohail Inayatullah’s six pillars, cross-impact analysis and the notion of preferred futures. What surprised me – once I really started looking – was how so much of this thinking is already ingrained in the way many people think.

This became apparent to me recently when I acted completely out of character and took time off to attend an early December conference in Senegal, West Africa; just as the final hurdle of the 2024 working year was looming large. The move was unusual because for decades I’ve religiously mirrored the schedules of my clients and kept our office open until either 16 or 23 December, depending on their needs and wants. This year, with my colleague and friend Gaye Crossley presenting her Master’s research at the conference, I couldn’t resist the opportunity to support her and my fellow women journalists from Africa. Plus the lure of having my feet on African soil after a year in the UK drew me in like iron filings to a powerful magnet.

The event in question was the African Women in Media (AWiM) 2024 conference. Organised by the eponymous AWiM, the gathering featured a compelling group of journalists, media professionals, researchers and academics who share a common commitment to creating an enabling environment for African women in the media to operate – that also means challenging and shifting how women are represented on the global stage. The conference itself was focused on the relevant issue of sustainability, which opened the door for interesting presentations on business models, strategy and – of course – the ethics of using artificial intelligence (AI).

Social media, podcasts, the metaverse, and trust trust trust featured strongly. It was a quality two-day line-up put together by Dr Yemisi Aknibobola and her team, and I hung on the words of speakers like Nelly Kalu, Keziah Githinji, Juliana Da Penha, Christina Chan-Meetoo, Dr Theodora Adjin-Tettey, Imani Henry, as well as South Africa’s Ferial Haffajee and Professor Glenda Daniels.

I found myself muttering ‘systems thinking, good, good, good’ or ‘yes, yes’ to comments calling for greater resilience and longevity within media organisations, or to acknowledgements that media organisations continue to face strong headwinds from the likes of AI and citizen journalists. As Dr Aknibobola noted in her keynote address: We need to set our vision for the next 30 years and ask ourselves what aspects within our realm or control we can change in the next 30 years in order to shift the dial on issues like gender based violence and sustainability in our chosen profession.

For the record, 30 years is a time period that keeps futurist satisfied. It’s far enough away to allow trends to develop but close enough to retain immediacy and relevance. Remember, attention spans are short these days. A 30-year time horizon also requires more than just a surface overview of easy-to-spot developments and beckons futures conscious leaders to really dig into the problems they are facing as an industry, as a continent and as part of the world. This was something Phathiswa Magopeni, the former SABC Board Director and AWiM Deputy Board chairwoman, noted in her presentation when she called for more “creative, future-focused research” if the media is going to understand this new beast we are playing with – AI – and even to fully understand where social media fits into the picture. Critically, as my colleague Gaye Crossley emphasised in her paywall research, this is where that trust – or mistrust – issue really comes into play. And as media professionals we can’t afford to take our eye off that particular ball.

Encouragingly, most of the presentations I listened to didn’t just go the ‘you must’ route, or pontificate at length about the well-documented ills or advantages of robust media enterprises, but instead presenters outlined areas of practical focus, research and concerted action.

I suppose what sets futures thinking apart from just reflecting/musing/daydreaming about the future are the techniques used to recognise what future we are aiming for and what an ideal world/business/relationship might look like. With that in mind, you begin to put action steps in place, in the here and now, to shape that reality. It’s like having a big vision board and deliberate goals for affording that fancy yacht or university degree, I guess.

Personally, I’ve always been a bit of a daydreamer, fabricating wonderful storylines of derring-do and dare when my mind wandered off in algebra or (personal favourite) during morning chapel services – but most often these came to nought. Instead of putting pen to paper and doing something with those wild leaps of imagination they stayed tucked away on my internal hard drive, being overwritten year after year until only a fragment lurked somewhere in the background.

Strategic plans, foresight exercises, and futures thinking all have one thing in common. They need to be out in the world, not hidden in a crusty old document or the mind of the CEO, and they need elbow room to flex and grow. To adapt a quote from Thornton Wilder — whose play The Merchant of Yonkers was adapted into one of my favourite musicals of all time, Hello Dolly — futures scenarios are, if you’ll excuse the expression, like mature, they aren’t worth a thing if they aren’t spread around.

What I took away from AWiM24 was a belief that we can distinguish between our perfect futures, and those which are both possible and probably given our current trajectory. Then, having spotted where we are veering off course, we can tweak and turn our strategic steps as we aim for true north. It’s a living process that needs events like the AWiM24 conference to bring us all together to compare notes and reaffirm our common commitment. In what promises to be yet another uncertain and unpredictable year ahead, that vision and intention really is more important than ever before. ?