Think Like a Futurist: Your Guide to Future Literacy!

22 Jan 2025 · 1 min

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In this segment, the speaker emphasizes that everyone already practices a form of futurism by contemplating personal goals and milestones for the upcoming year, such as resolutions or plans for education, family, and retirement. While many feel they lack the time or formal qualifications to become a futurist, the speaker argues that we are all natural futurists and can enhance this innate ability by learning to actively read, understand, and interpret the surrounding world and information streams. Rather than waiting for experts to label a few relevant trends, individuals should develop the skill of identifying and applying trends themselves. The talk references Afsana’s Future Study course at Stellenbosch Business School as an example, but stresses that formal study is not a prerequisite for becoming a better futurist.

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And then the last one is that we need to learn, all of us, how to think like a futurist. I know Afsana has done the Future Study course at Stellenbosch Business School, and very often when people talk to futurists, they say, oh, you know, I don't have time to go and study and get a qualification. I don't have time for that. But we don't need to. We are all natural futurists. Everyone has looked at 2025 and thought, I wonder what I can achieve in this year. What can I— what is my resolution? What is on my bingo card? What am I hoping to experience this year? If we've thought about our education, our children's education, our retirement, we are all futurists. We're natural futurists, but we can become better futurists when we start to learn to read and understand and interpret the world around us and the information we're receiving, rather than just waiting for somebody to name one or two trends that apply to our field and then see how we can go and apply those. So it's really important that we learn to think like a futurist.