Jeremy Kirshbaum from IFTF explains a forecasting method that moves from foresight to insight to action. He argues 10-year forecasts matter, separates trends from disruptions, and frames forecasts as stories using the hero's journey structure. Examples include Syngenta, the UK government, and Sudan.
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So our methodology can be boiled down at its root to foresight, insight, and action. So good foresight stimulates great insight, and every winning strategy is based on a compelling insight. So this is where we live, foresight to insight. Foresight is a plausible, internally consistent, provocative story about the future. What we're trying to do with our forecast is provoke insight for you. We're not an expert in your business. We know— sometimes we know nothing about it. We're trying to give you an idea of external future forces that are going to impact across industries to stimulate— whoop, what happened? To stimulate the end of the presentation. It's a VUCA world, right? To stimulate compelling insight that leads to effective action. So this is where somewhere like— someone like McKinsey lives. This is like generally like consulting groups. We often collaborate with them in order to do projects. We live on this curve. So for instance, on reciprocity advantage, Bob teamed up with Carl Rahn, the mind behind products like Febreze and Swiffer, Mr. Clean Magic Eraser at P&G, a really brilliant product innovator, 'cause he's really in this insight to action space, as Bob focuses on here, and this is where I live too. We don't focus on trends. We focus on disruption. So trends are things that you can predict with relative accuracy, things like demography or changes in temperature, whereas disruptions are changes in the pattern that are harder to look at through data. You probably are very good trends people, and often in companies we work with their top trends people, and it's really hard for them until we're done with the forecast to understand why they're dealing with qualitative researchers. But like for instance, we did a forecast for Syngenta and they are a plant innovation company somewhere in the realm of Monsanto and so their top trends person was working with us and just every meeting she was just like, this is useless, this is useless, this is useless. And then finally she saw the whole story at the end and she understood. So that's our job. Trends leads to incremental innovation, doing things that you're already doing better. Disruptions lead to radical change. So most of your time should be spent on trends. Some of the time should be spent on radical disruptions. You're a startup, so maybe a little bit more time for you. So why 10-year forecasting? We talked a little bit about this, why it's more effective. Besides the ones up on here, can anyone think of reasons why we do forecasting 10 years out as opposed to like 50 years?
Oh, as opposed to 50? I was going to say, as opposed to 2, you can't tell what your competition is doing. There are other variables. As opposed to 50, you can't really predict a lot of things in the tech industry or really in a lot of these products that we're talking about making or design ideas that we're talking about doing.
Right. It's a lot harder. It gets kind of science fictiony out there, right? And also, one of the key things for me is that It increases your sense of urgent optimism. So this is a phrase that our fellow Jane McGonigal uses. She's a very innovative and world-renowned game designer. And when it's 10 years out, it's still close enough that it matters to you. And we have done 50-year forecasts. We did one for the government of the United Kingdom, for instance. But it's difficult at that point to really care about it. But it's also far enough out that you can always be optimistic. We just did one with the government of Sudan. bringing people together to imagine the future of Sudan. Because when you're talking about a 2-year timeline, it can get a little bit contentious, but when you're looking 10 years out, you're able to imagine a shared future. So a forecast is a story. It's a, it's a specific kind of story that provokes something in the present. A great forecast is a mythical story. So what do we mean by this? A myth reveals the structure of reality. There's no myth that's not the unveiling of a mystery. So it should be revelatory for you in some way. You should see it and say, whoa, this resonates with me. So an example of this is the hero's journey, which you're all on right now. So this is what is known as— has anyone heard of this before?
No.
Any liberal arts majors in the room? So this was a discovery— this is a— you have heard of it?
Yeah, I've had this diagram in high school.
Yeah, yeah, okay. So it's known as a monomyth. It was discovered by someone named Joseph Campbell in his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces, and this storyline is the structure of myths across nearly every culture on Earth. Whether that's Star Wars or the Bible or Steve Jobs' speech when he introduced the iPhone. So basically the gist of it without going through every single step is the hero is in the ordinary world, something calls him to adventure, you get your advertisement for Draper University and you're like, oh, this looks so cool. Refusal of the call, no, I could never do that, it's too far, it's too expensive, I couldn't do it. You cross over the threshold into the special world, that's where we are now. So what you're doing right now is you're collecting, you're going to go through obstacles, and you're eventually gonna collect the knowledge you need to go back home and fix the problems that brought you here. Something brought you here. You've come here to find something, your elixir, your sword, to go back and fix the problems. So right now you're not on Tatooine anymore, you've left Tatooine, and you— I'm on a mission. You've talked to R2-D2 and Obi-Wan. And so now, you probably haven't met Darth Vader yet, but I think you'll get through it. And my point in putting this is that what we're looking at is we're trying to look ahead a little bit. We're trying to cheat a little bit and look ahead at the story and see what's gonna happen here so we know better what we can do while we're down here. So we work with someone named Kendall Haven who looks at the neuroscience of storytelling, and he was— He does work with DARPA, the research arm of the Defense Department. And they hired him because they didn't know why Taliban propaganda was working better than our propaganda. Their stories were more compelling to people. More people were going over to their side. And they needed to find out. So he is a neuroscientist. And so he hooked up people to 60 different sensors. He took them to a lab, 60 different sensors, and monitored their reactions. While showing them different stories. And he came up with some very compelling insights. One, our brains want to look for stories. They're wired to look for stories. And if we don't get them, we make them up. So that's why forecasting is important, is because we're always telling ourselves the story of the future, whether we know it or not. We're always telling us the story of the future of our company. And this gives us the power to take hold of that and do it consciously.
