What Is The Future Of Futurism?
As I have become better at being an expert futurist, I have come to realize that helping people understand what the future might hold is the easiest part of being a futurist.
I have realized that what happens after is the most important factor in our success as a futurist.
It is relatively easy to put up some slides about AI and CRISPR, about climate change and obesity, and about the longing for belonging.
To echo Marx, up to now, futurists have only interpreted the what is coming in various ways. The point, however, is to shape it.
Introducing The "Leadership Futurist"
In the 28 years that I have been a professional futurist, I have pushed the tools of futurism so they better frame and communicate the changes and transformations going on in the world.
I have invented new methods and frameworks to help leaders not just fit the future but forge it through bold innovation and brave business transformation.
I have tried to simplify and condense my ideas and insights—while also increasing their clarity and coherence—so tired, overwhelmed, and anxious leaders can engage with them without shutting down or switching off.
Yet, this was still not enough to have the capacity to guide executives to shape the future of their industry in a way that works for all.
For that, I needed to become a transformational leader myself. One cannot capture hearts and minds and lead them without becoming a leader oneself. I call this role being a "Leadership Futurist."
Becoming A Leader of Leaders
Inspiring leaders, usually at a top management event or at a major conference, to even think about changing what they do, adapting to the future, and stepping up with courage to shape the future is far more challenging and far more important than telling people what may or may not happen.
Half of the job is to help an audience understand what might be possible, probable, problematic, and preferable in the future. So far, so obvious.
However, the other half is to help them overcome their fears, limitations, and patterns to play an active role in shaping the future together for the benefit of themselves and their entire organization... but also for the benefit of all life on the planet.
This requires not just intellectual analysis and cognitive smarts but the capacity to lead leaders to change, adapt, innovate, and transform with empathic resonance, trust, and courage.
This is not just about informing but also transforming leaders.
This has required my own journey of leadership development to develop the emotional intelligence, storytelling skills, influencing capacity, and radical self-awareness needed to stand on stage and bring very smart and successful people with you to places that are unfamiliar, untrammeled, and uncertain.
Context Is As Important As Content
To be a good leadership futurist, we have to understand not just what is coming but also where our clients are coming from: their unique industry context, their organizational ambitions, their regional and local structures, and, above all, their legacy culture, mindsets, habits, etc.
This means a lot of our minds and most of our hearts must be focused on the context we are speaking into rather than our (awesome, I assume) content.
Content maybe King. It gets you on stage. It gets you access. But context is Queen for the Leadership Futurist. It is what allows you to be effective at leading leaders to a regenerative future.
Armed with context and content—and balancing hubris and humility as leaders ourselves—we can harness our ideas and insights to help solve problems that really matter and support our clients to change their culture, mindsets, and behaviors so they seize the opportunities to wrestle world-changing breakthroughs from the jaws of chaos.
A metaphor I like to use to bring this idea to life is the Ghanaian symbol of the Sankofa. It is a bird that symbolizes the crucial need to reflect on and understand the past if we want to build a successful future.
The Leadership Futurist: Mastering Cognitive Complexity & Embodied Wisdom
As I have developed my mind's capacity to understand and track the behavior of complex systems, I have pushed myself to attain more of what developmental scientists call "cognitive complexity."
Cognitive complexity, to me, means the capacity to understand the rich, varied, and often hidden connections between agents and actors within a complex system, whether healthcare, the economy, or a social system like the body of a nation.
Cognitive complexity requires one to track and make sense of negative and positive feedback loops, deep drivers of change, influences and incentives, biases and behavioral constraints, hidden and more obvious relationships, and the emergence of novelty.
Mastering cognitive complexity is key to the future of futurism.
Yet, it is necessary but not sufficient for being effective as a futurist in our world in crisis.
When one studies complexity science, organizational and culture change, and systemic transformation in-depth and over many years, one starts to realize that leadership of change requires us to be brilliant at relationships, too.
We must focus less on being the smartest in the room and more on being the wisest. This means developing what we call, in our leadership consultancy Switch On Leadership—where we teach, train, and build conscious and transformational leaders, "embodied wisdom."
Embodied wisdom includes our capacity to imagine and intuit as much as intellectually analyze. This is crucial for the futurist if the future given that complexity science tells us that predicting the emergence of complex systems is hard to impossible (although AI systems may soon be able to help us far better than human intelligence can).
It also includes skills and capabilities like:
Having compassion for people who will lose out in the future
Having empathy for those struggling to break with convention and do what is right for the world
Have insight into how to shift outdated drivers and motivations that got humanity into so much trouble
Have ideas about how to elegantly inspire leaders and innovators to use the new exponential technologies coming online in socially responsible, moral, and regenerative ways
When cognitive complexity and embodied wisdom are developed in parallel, in purposeful harmony, we can step into more advanced stages/states/structures of leadership development to become genuine transformers and regenerators of our world. We can be part of leading the world into what I call MettaModernity.
You can see our model for this progression here:
Leading To Better, Brighter & More Regenerative Future
After many years of learning and developing, and always restlessly improving my craft, I help groups of leaders and people managers at events all over the world take a more active role in forging the:
If you'd like to find out more about how I might help your audience grapple with the future and wrestle breakthroughs from the jaws of chaos, send my team a message through the inquire now form.
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You may want to read my other posts about professional futurism and futurist keynote speakers:
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