What Is Futures Thinking? (Explained in Under 2 Minutes)

I'm often asked by people, what even is futures thinking? So let's have a quick look. Futures thinking isn't crystal ball gazing. There's a set of business models, futures models, and tools that we use to learn how to read and anticipate the future and then respond to the information that we are discovering. Why do we need to look at futures thinking? Well, 2 main reasons is the fast pace of the world and the complexity of the world that we're in these days. We can't hope to get by on tools and approaches that worked 2 or 3 decades ago because it just isn't relevant in our world anymore. Why don't we look at futures thinking more often? That's probably more of a human issue than anything else. We don't look at it because the future is scary and intimidating. It looks too big, too much, and kind of like, where do we start in this mess? So we just avoid it. What if we don't look at the future? The answer is simple. In this day and age, we'll become irrelevant, redundant, unemployed. Again, the approaches that worked in the past no longer work. We have got to find what new ways to respond to the world as it is changing. But there are benefits if we do. And just some of them is that we can avoid hazards. We can identify potential problems sooner. We can benefit from certain opportunities. We can explore new options that weren't available to us before. And ultimately we have a sense of peace. That's a calm lily. We have a sense of peace knowing that we've done what we need to do to face the future and that we're not avoiding it. There are 2 more questions you're going to ask. How do we do that? Well, futures thinking isn't simple, but it doesn't need to be overly complex. Essentially, we're going to look at anticipating the future, considering our beliefs and what needs to change, and then learning how to make better choices. We'll explore more of those in future videos. And then your last question is, who am I? Well, I'm Charlotte Kemp, professional futurist, keynote speaker, and hopefully your futures thinking partner.