How to Bring More Rigor to Your Long-Term Thinking

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Allison I'm alison beard.

And I'm adi ignatius and this is the hbr ideacast.

Adi, how good are you at predicting the future?

I am very bad at predicting the future. In fact, you could use my predictions as a counter indicator of what actually is going to happen. But why are you asking?

Well, predicting the future is something that.

Every business leader tries to do as they're planning their long term strategy.

But it's obviously extraordinary, extremely difficult, particularly in the current world. It seems like no matter how much.

Data you gather or logical projections you make, you really don't know what's next.

Or what's going to happen.

But our guest today has a framework for helping us do a better job.

Yeah, that sounds really valuable. I mean we are living in a period of hyper uncertainty. That's absolutely true. And sometimes the response is just live with uncertainty. But surely there's a better way to kind of tease out the weak signals or think about your own goals and visions and be a little bit better at predicting what's next.

Yeah, and so that's why I wanted.

To talk to Nick Foster. He is a futurist who's worked as.

A designer at some of the world's.

Biggest tech focused companies, including Google X, Sony and Dyson. And he's the author of the book Could, Should, Might How We Think about the Future. So he argues that most of us fall into one of those four patterns.

On the one side is could futurism.

Which is overly optimistic, tech centered utopia.

And then on the opposite extreme is.

Don'T, where you're thinking about all the negative externalities and we're seeing that play out in the debate over the future of AI right now. So here's my conversation with Nick.

Nick, thanks so much for being with me today.

Oh, it's lovely to be here. Thanks for the invitation.

You've worked closely with companies like Sony, Nokia and Google to help them think about and design the products and services of the future. How in your experience do organizational leaders typically approach this work and what do they tend to get wrong?

My opinions are all tainted by the companies that I've worked for. So, you know, my experiences are quite narrowly focused on large technocratic organizations, which is where I've spent the majority of my career. But I think it's a spectrum and I think I've been fortunate to work in companies that have, you know, typically a separate team or a group of people explicitly focused on long term futures oriented projects, which is I think, a part of the problem and the sort of a blessing and a curse in equal measures. You need a lot of time and money typically to build those sorts of units. And you need to have a company where there's that amount of flexibility and the desire to explore and shape the future. Quite often it's cleaved off into these sort of separate labs and separate units. That's the first thing it sort of others this kind of work in an, I think an unhelpful way. And it sort of means that other people in the rest of the organization feel like it's not their job. But more importantly, I think what I've noticed is the people within organizations tend to fall into one of the four pockets when it comes to thinking about the future. And what I think it leads to is a lack of rigor in the sort of general tone and quality of future thought in almost every company that I've worked in. I think it's symptomatic of just the larger place we have found for conversations about the future in society, culture and everyday life.

So why don't we dig into those four types of futurism that you cover in your book and their respective strengths and weaknesses. First, how would you define could futurism?

Could futurism is what I would call the most sort of overtly futuristic type of futures work that we see so much. If you were to go to Google Images and type the future or futuristic, you'd see the gleaming kind of crystal architecture and robotics and drones and all of the sort of usual whiz bang icons of progress that we're very familiar with. And could futurism is about that sort of wide eyed technocratic expectation about the future being this transformational place.

Flying cars, houses on Mars, all of that.

All of that sort of stuff. Yeah, this way of thinking about the future as a sort of modernist ideal brought about by sort of technology being this great sort of savior and driving force behind things. And I think the weakness of this way of thinking, there's quite a few actually. But one of the main weaknesses is it's very heroic. Just like science fiction cinema is very heroic. It paints the future. Sort of people that live in the future as these heroes, these extreme characters. And it feels more like advertising than it does talk about real life and real people and real experiences. And I think again, it pitches the future sort of over there somewhere as opposed to what it really is. Which is an evolution of the present. And it very rarely engages with conversations about if we are to be doing these things in 15 years, 20 years time, what does two years time look like, what does the next step look like and what does it mean when it is mass adopted into everyday culture.

And I imagine that it's something that people leading businesses day to day see as too far out to strategize around.

I mean, it depends. Again, my eyesight is blurred by the places I've worked, which have been, you know, I was head of design at Google X for a long time and the very explicit nature of that work, to think very pointedly about long term horizons. I am a designer, but fortunately I've also been around a lot of scientists and engineers and entrepreneurs and strategists and business leaders. And the thing that's really interesting is when we're talking about product details or technical details or science and the core building blocks of the technologies we're working on, there's this desire for real rigor and depth of thinking about what we're talking about. But as soon as we talk about 10 years, 15 years hence, people from all ilks just sort of lazily grab for things from the Jetsons or references from Minority Report or some sort of Star Trek reference. And I think that that's a sort of critical failure of when we find ourselves too heavily relying on could futurism. It's just, it is a placeholder. It stops us really embracing and engaging with what we're building and why it matters and what it might lead to.

Okay, so let's move on to the next bucket of future thinking. Should, what do you mean by that?

Well, should is this sort of feeling of certainty about the future, this notion of an end point that we know is coming and we're headed towards it in work environments and in businesses. I think this has been replaced largely by the notion of data and using sort of patterns of data and being able to algorithmically decode the world somehow to convert a solid line into a dotted line and make a projection become the dominant form of sort of business futurism, I would say. But I think the challenge with this type of work is firstly, it leads us to think of the future as a singular dot on a chart, a singular point as opposed to a territory or a zone. But also, I think anyone who's spent any time around this sort of projection environment knows that these lines don't move in the paths that we think they're going to move in. And I think we're not Open and honest enough about that level of uncertainty in this type of work. So corporate strategy is sort of the flag carrier for this type of work, I would say, in business. And again, it has its benefits and it's made its way right to the top of lots of large organizations based on previous experience and previous data. But it is still storytelling. And I don't think we're honest enough about that.

So the weakness of that type of thinking is believing that what the data shows you is true. Because data can be manipulated. You can pick numbers to tell any kind of story.

Yeah, absolutely. And all the data we seek is inherently incomplete. It's increasingly sort of stochastic and volatile. The systems that we play within have become these sort of hyper objects where the edges are really fuzzy and random acts can affect things absolutely dramatically. Overnight, some celebrity could tweet something about your brand or your company. A ship could get stuck in the Suez Canal and suddenly all your modeling and projections that felt so day before suddenly become completely off. And it is probably the best we can do right now in terms of a technique. But I don't think we're honest enough about that sort of blurriness of those lines and those dots. And we should sort of start to try and look a little bit more perhaps at the third type of futures work that I refer to, which I call might.

Yeah, that's a perfect transition. So go ahead and tell us about might futurism.

At risk of this turning into some sort of lecture. Might futures is sort of what we do every day. It's about basically scenario, plan sort of builds itself off this natural game playing, strategy, mindset. Things like chess are very much Mike futurism. If I move here, they might do this, and if they do that, then I might do this. It became more formalized in the Cold War with people like Herman Kahn and Rand Corporation and people like Pierre Vac working at Royal Dutch Shell. It coincides with the growth of Big Compute, really, which is this idea of the space ahead of us is sort of unknowable. But we can plot likelihood and certainty out into that space. And if this happens, then that might happen. In my world, in sort of design, this is the type of futures work that is sold as a service. A lot of strategic foresight, the ability to run a model, run an extrapolation of we should do this, we should do that. So it's sort of multiple storytellings at any one time.

And it seems like businesses have largely embraced this type of thinking, envisioning multiple potential futures. What might happen if you go down a certain strategic path, what might happen if you go down a different one and then making a decision based on all of those predictions, right?

Yes, absolutely. And again, it's probably one of the more prevalent forms of sort of business futures work. And certainly it has its place. Some of the critiques of this way of thinking are based around imagination. Actually, when we come to thinking about the future, it sort of extends like a cone from our chest outwards. The further out we go, the wider it becomes and the more uncertain things become. But I think we are actually proven to be not very good at imagining what might actually be out there. It's very easy to say, well, that would never happen, that's impossible, and sort of push it out into the impossible outside of this cone of possibility. Also, time doesn't really work how we think it does. Lots of things are exponential and they happen a lot quicker than we think they might happen. You ask companies like Nokia, where I used to work, or Blockbuster or Kodak whether they had all of the ideas about the future in front of them in place. They'd probably say, yeah, we had a pretty fair idea. But we all know from history they were sideswiped by something that they either didn't see coming or they put way out in the sort of preposterous that'll never happen territory. Our levels of imagination and a sort of breadth of ideation around potential futures. It's not as good as we think it is.

The might thinkers need to do better at the could and then also the don't. Which brings us to the final of the four types. So what is don't futurism?

Don't futurism is something that I think we all do, and I think we're sort of seeing it more and more in public society now. This notion of the future as a place where we want to stop certain things without wanting to stray too far into the lands of dystopia. It's definitely about pointing out all the negative externalities of the things that might happen if we keep going on this path or we take that decision. I think it can be super powerful and it's definitely forming a large part of the discourse in politics and in business at the moment. I think sometimes it can be quite easy to dismiss as fear mongering. It often sits outside of the positions of power that it wants to change and sort of wags its finger from the outside and says, no, no, no, you mustn't. And I think a future where this type of work is more integrated within these organizations that these people want to change would be more potent. I think there is a version of don't futurism which is less sort of flip the table and burn it all down, which is this sort of feeling of responsibility in the work that we're producing and the decisions we're making, sort of playing through the implications of the things that we're bringing about. The reality is all of us today are living in this world, which is an accidental time capsule that was planted by our predecessors, and we're mopping up the lack of thought that they put into the future. So we're starting to feel like maybe we should be doing a bit more there and thinking a bit more responsibly.

I would say from my perspective, it seems as if the corporate world has very much been focused on could, should, might and not as much thinking about the knock on effects of the products and services that they've put into the world. Why do you think that it's an important time for all of us to rethink the way we are imagining or predicting or planning for the future?

This is something that I've been interested in for a long time because I've been working in thinking about the future for large organizations for nearly a quarter century now. And as I said, observing people try to do it, it feels like an underdeveloped skill. And I think it's important right now because we are right in the midst of a tidal wave of change. You know, 100 years ago there was no penicillin. When I was born, only 50 years ago, there were half as many people alive on earth. So there's been huge amounts of change, not just technological change, but political change and societal change and cultural change. And I feel like if we don't start to train ourselves to think about the future with depth and with rigor and responsibility will just get even shorter and shorter in our horizon. And I think that that will lead us to places where we really don't want to be. It'll lead us into a place of constantly having to find workarounds and patches and fixes for, like I said, these accidental decisions that we make with very little time and energy being spent on what it might mean for the 10, 20, 30 year horizons. The ability to change things at scale, at speed is leading to more and more of these knock on effects. And it feels like we're really lacking in our dialogue around the future and our language and our ability to describe what we're trying to set in motion.

As we think about the leaders and companies who will affect this sort of change in their organizations. The first companies that come to mind are those that are inventing the future. You know, Google, Microsoft, Apple, OpenAI, Tesla, SpaceX. Do you think that they're doing a good job of balancing the could, should, might and don't right now? Because they're the ones creating the products and services that will sort of drive how all the rest of us do business and live our lives.

You will find pockets of all of these types of ways of thinking in all of those companies. And I think also politics plays a big role in this way that our future is shaped, but also society and culture too, and media. And so across the board, what I'm trying to do with this work is to try and say, I don't think we need any more books that sort of have a manifesto or tell us what we should be doing in the future. And I don't really think we need that from our business leaders either. People want the conversation to be more nuanced and deeper and more rigorous and more detailed and be full of uncertainty. Those are difficult things for leaders of any ilk to stand on a stage saying, we're excited about this. We think this is where it might lead. We think these are the opportunities, and we also not sure about where this might go. Those are difficult things. I really feel at my fingertips that audiences, whatever that we call those customers, users, lay people, whatever it is, they really want to hear better stories about the future. And when I say better, I mean more balanced. And so each of those companies that you mentioned, at different moments, to different audiences, says a lot of could or a lot of should or a lot of don't or a lot of might, but they don't sort of say it in the round. And I think that's what I would love to see more of. But that requires a whole different way of doing business and a whole different sort of focus of capital and resource towards thinking more pointedly about the future, which a lot of companies are kind of reticent to do for some good reasons.

And it's a much more complicated message to deliver to consumers and investors.

Well, yeah, it doesn't fit on a billboard very well or on a campaign podium, and it will take a massive amount of bravery to do that, because it's hard to even think six months ahead at the moment, let alone six years or six decades. But those months and those decades will come. And hopefully, if you're a successful company, you will be playing a part in those months and those decades. So what does your company look like, what is it going to be doing? What does it care about? What are your customers going to be getting?

So there's a whole other bucket of companies in more traditional industries that maybe aren't designing the cutting edge products and services, but they still need to consider how the future is going to play out. So how do you recommend that they do a better job of applying those four types of thinking to get ahead of the curve of the new technologies that might be coming at them?

A lot of companies are so busy trying to, you know, chase the calendar appointments and make the deals and make the sales and get things done that setting up some sort of futures team or some sort of explicit organization to look long term is a privilege that most companies actually don't have. So I'm aware of that. But it doesn't mean to say you can't encourage your team at every level to think more pointedly about, yes, let's do that now. And that seems like the right thing, but can we just spend the last 10 minutes of the meeting talking about maybe some of the other of these four ways of thinking about the future? If we do that, what bad things might happen? Yes, we're going to do that, but what other things might we do if this thing really works, what could we end up with at the end? Breeding that into the culture of an organization and breeding that into teams at every level and encouraging people that it is their place to ask those kinds of questions, I think will lead you to a more rounded organization. And I think that culture spreads really quickly if it's encouraged.

So it sort of starts at the top with the C suite and the board having some of these more philosophical conversations when they're making long term decisions. But then you'd also like to see it filtering down sort of to the team level anytime a new initiative or project is being discussed?

Yeah, I think so. I think that's an actionable thing. I could see most companies being able to do is just carving out a small amount of time and giving every employee the permission to point at things and say, well, what does this lead to next? What's the second and third version of this? What does that look like? What are we missing here? What implications might we be setting in motion? I think that doesn't take too much in terms of investment of time or money. And I think I've seen it make some pretty major changes in the way people show up to their work.

Would you say for organizations that is the goal, to just sort of get everyone thinking with, through the Four lenses? Or can you build teams to sort of make sure you have a could thinker, a should thinker, a might thinker and a don't thinker all working together?

This might be the time for me to stand up and say, I could be wrong with these four categories, just. Or there could be a fifth. What I'm hoping to do with this book is just to start that conversation about this is what I've seen and this is what I've observed. Back to your point about the shape of teams. When I took over the helm of the head of design at Google X, there was an industrial design team, there was a user research team, there was very specialist, very sort of, I wouldn't say siloed, but very specialist practitioners. And very quickly what I did was reduce all of that and say it's the design team. And I think the important part of that is you can have your own specialism and bring it to the party, but being able to play laterally and understand other people's perspective is part of what I mean when I say rigorous futures. So we would have people in the team who came from a more sort of strategic McKinsey sort of MBA type background. You could do the sort of the numbers version and think about competitive landscapes and think about that. But we'd also have very creative industrial designers who understood the future of objects and the future of devices and could play in that space more keenly. And then we had people that came from more of a critical and speculative background who could think about implications and societal reasoning around new products, new technologies, what it might mean. And getting all of those people to play together in a team wasn't always straightforward actually, but yielded really strong results that felt way more rounded than most of the futures work that exists in corporations and indeed in media and in the general discourse about the future that I'm still really proud of. I think some of that work was really good.

Yeah, lots of healthy discussion and debate, I imagine. Talk about the importance of detail and sort of thinking, not just big picture, but extremely granularly to the most mundane ways your product or service or new technology might be affecting people's lives. Why is that so important when you're thinking about the future?

A long time ago I coined a phrase the future mundane, which has sort of followed me around like a pebble in my shoe. Actually. I've become very proud of it. So I was born and raised in Derby, which is a post industrial city in the uk, right in the middle of very gray, very rainy, and I grew up around sort of what I would call ordinary mundaneity. It's a very middling place where the median income is about median for the uk. It's not hot, it's not cold, it's not north, it's not south. It's just ordinary. But when I started my career as a sort of designer and a futures designer, I did a lot of that energetic could futurism I talked about earlier. Lots of excited renderings about all the opportunity that we had ahead of us. Lots of excitable sort of films and models and stories about what the future could hold. And my brain kept going back to Derby and thinking, actually, how would Derek use this? Is this really like what does this feel like? Not when it's in like some pristine lab in a vision video with some gene therapist working on a new cure, but like in Derek's backpack on the bus. And that ability to really see the present and look out the window and think about the future as you just look at the world around you and look in that ordinary everyday life that we all lead and think about the changes that we're talking about in the deep future. And thinking about this Derek that I'm talking about on a bus somewhere with a VR headset in his back or with some cybernetic thing whispering in his ear. It starts to ground the future and makes it easier to wrap your hands around and really rolling in the detail of that and starting to think about the middle of the bell curve and mass adoption and ordinary everyday experiences with things. It's not sexy, it's not exciting. Maybe shareholders don't really want to see it, but it is rigorous and I think it can actually lead to really smart decisions about what you do do and what you don't do in developing things in the present. So, you know, I get as much out of going to a 711 or a liquor store thinking about the future as I do going to a science lab or a. A tech demo. Because I think it just helps you understand that people are a huge part of the future and we need to understand them a lot more than perhaps.

We do in the organizations where you have implemented this change in approach or consulted with leaders to make sure they're thinking through the four lenses. How have you seen that more holistic futurism pay off?

Yeah, I won't say it's always been straightforward if I'm honest. It's a spectrum of results. I'd say I would love to tell you more about my work, but you've.

Signed too many NDAs.

Yeah, a little bit. But futures work by its very nature. Happens very early on in a project and in the types of companies I've worked at, it could be 5, 7, 10, 12 years before that develops into a public facing product proposition. For example, when you're working with really nascent technologies or really sort of uncertain techniques also a lot of those things just crater and never go anywhere. For good reason. They're not a good business. The technology doesn't work, something like that. So the sort of KPIs or the ROIs of this type of work is also why a lot of companies don't invest in it. Because it's hard to point at something and say because we did this, it led to that. I think of it more like a sort of cultural nudging and helping to sort of knock the sharp edges off an idea and give it some shape, as opposed to saying because we did this exercise, it's led to these outcomes and it has a dollar amount fixed to it. But I've definitely seen the change in some of the leaders I've worked with and some of the projects I've helped shape. And the things that we ended up with I think are more well rounded and well reasoned and stand a better chance of surviving and making the kinds of impact and change that the people who came up with the ideas were hoping for.

And what do you say to potential clients or other people you come across who say this is just too time consuming, it's too pie in the sky. It's a thought exercise that really I can't apply practically to my strategy, to the things that I'm doing in the next year, three years, five years.

Yeah. There are many opinions out there and everyone's entitled to theirs. I think that's fine. I think history shows that people have a good idea and really work at the details. Those are the people that succeed. And I do think that having an idea about longer term horizons than near term shipping, let's say, is just a vital part of any company having a long game. Even if it's sort of small and it's just nascent and it exists in the background. Spending dedicated time to build that thing is good for morale. It's good for decision making. It's good for understanding where things are difficult, where things might need to be addressed at some point.

And is there a leader or two that you would point to in the business world, political, nonprofit, that you see doing a really good job of thinking about the future? Right now?

I think it's spotty. Demis Hassabis is doing a nice job of shipping product real quick and getting things out, but also having a perspective on what that work might lead to.

And he's the CEO of Google, DeepMind and isomorphic labs?

Yeah, absolutely. I think he does a good job of balancing sort of short term with a level of sort of corporate social responsibility and an understanding of the implications and uncertainty around what they're building. I think that's quite refreshing as well of that level of responsibility in thinking about the future. That I think is a growing skill in a lot of people.

I know you said you don't like the idea of futurism being sort of sidelined and with organizations, but would it be useful to for companies of a certain size to appoint someone who's responsible for that and responsible for sort of building that culture within the organization?

I think so. I mean, I would say that I think it does a good job of saying from a C suite level, we care about this stuff and it's important, please pay attention to this person we brought into this senior role and listen to what they say. The challenge is typically then a team forms around that person and then it becomes its separate thing. And quite often that either means that it's cleaved off into like a separate unit that just does sort of pet projects and maybe sort of marketing fluff, let's say, or it becomes the police that moves through an organization with a strict rod and says, you're not doing enough of this, you should do this. I think that's when it starts to break down. I think what you really want is for people to be led by the hand a little bit and shown like, this is the kind of work that we care about and we think is.

Important at a lower level.

I do think that happens in a lot of organizations, but it tends to happen at sort of annual off sites or brainstorming sessions. And everyone gets really energized about all these potential ideas and then nothing really ever happens. So how do you overcome that?

Yeah, it gets back to the sort of KPI ROI of this type of work. When I was working in sort of design agencies back in London in the early 2000s, clients would come in and we'd run these sessions. Very quickly I realized that they were either little puff pieces of exercise that nobody was actually that bothered about, but it was just a way to sort of have an away day, or it was honestly, this happened. It was a bit of extra budget left at the end of the financial year that they were like, we could do an off site or an Escape room or we could go and do one of these things. I also think a lot of the people that do this work professionally and sell it as a skill or sell it as a service, let's say, are not the best people to follow through with it and that bridging often doesn't happen. I think you need advocacy and air cover for that type of work. So you need somebody who is the champion of this type of work and says, I actually really care about this. This is not just a fun off site. I see problems ahead of us, I see opportunities ahead of us, I see things we need to address. I want to do it in this setting. But because again, this work is very difficult to quantify and very difficult to sort of see the direct through lines. You need air cover for that work as well. You need someone to protect it and say, no, no, no, give it time, give it time and give it space. Give it, you know, keep away, don't kill it and start to see it through. I learned that from a good friend of mine, Simon Waterfall, who said advocacy and air cover are the things you need to keep this work alive. Otherwise, as you said, it gets killed or it gets forgotten or it gets ignored.

Yeah.

I would add another. A sort of generating something actionable out of it. You know, even if it's a couple years in the future to be able to point back and say, well, this exercise enabled us to shift our thinking in this way which yielded this product. And maybe there isn't an ROI you can calculate, but you are making the case that that thinking led to action.

Yeah, you need a. I hate the term next steps, but you need something that we're going to do tomorrow, like what are we actually going to do with this and what is it going to lead to? I might not be the right person to say exactly how we do that. I'm just trying to prise open that realization that I think it's an underdeveloped skill in individuals, in organizations, in leadership. I've spent a lot of time doing this type of work. I've seen it, I've been around it, I've led some of it. I don't think it's up to the standard of a lot of other things. We wouldn't tolerate it in other parts of business. This level of sort of whimsy and looseness and lack of rigor. So I would love to see that conversation about the future get deeper, more responsible, more rigorous, more well rounded. There's probably a hundred ways to do that, but hopefully by breaking up the future into some more digestible chunks, we can at least acknowledge that we fall into certain habits and certain lockstep that might be closing our eyes off to other ways of thinking and other things we might be missing.

Terrific. Well, Nick, thank you so much for helping us all think more carefully about the future.

Oh, it's been my pleasure. Thanks for having me.

That's futurist Nick Foster, author of the book Could, Should, Might How We Think about the Future if you found this episode helpful, share it with a colleague and be sure to subscribe and rate IdeaCast in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. If you want to help leaders move the world forward, please consider subscribing to Harvard Business Review. You'll get access to the HBR mobile app, the weekly Exclusive Insider newsletter, and unlimited access to HBR Online. Just head to hbr.org subscribe thanks to our team, Senior Producer Mary Du, Audio Product Manager Ian Fox, and Senior Production Specialist Rob Eckhart. And thanks to you for listening to the HBR IdeaCast. We'll be back with a new episode on Tuesday. I'm Alison Beard.