Jeremy Kirshbaum from the Institute for the Future explains their 10-year forecasting methodology and the VUCA framework for volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous futures. He discusses leadership skills needed to navigate coming technological and social trends, referencing colleague Bob Johansen's work on future-ready leaders.
Chapters
I'll start with a glimpse of the future. So as Anna mentioned, I'm currently working at the Institute for the Future in nearby Palo Alto. We look at the future writ large. So we look at everything from the future of technology to the future of pets to the future of breakfast and snacks. And we do that for the public and large organizations. We've been doing it for about 46 years. In fact, we're the only futurist organization that we know of that has outlived its forecasts. Because we generally look at a 10-year timeline so we can look back, see how we did. But before I go into the future, we should talk a little bit about why you should listen to me. And the answer is time machines. We have time machines, you don't. I'm kidding. 2 reasons. One, methodology. We've been working on this for a really long time and we've gotten very, very refined processes looking at the future about 10 to 100 years out. You all are startups, so you're on the forefront of your industries. We're not an expert in your industry, you are. What we do is we bring foresight to stimulate insight to help you make effective strategic action. The second is the mandate. I spend a lot of time on this. You spend a lot of time on machine learning or payment processing or jumping in pools or whatever it is that you're really good at. This is, this is what we're good at. A lot of my research is based on the work of Bob Johansen. He came and talked here last year and had an amazing time with you guys. And he's been a practicing futurist for about 36 years now. So, he's at about 2,300, something like that. And I really suggest you check out his new books, Leaders Make the Future and Reciprocity Advantage. Reciprocity Advantage especially is really important for people who are starting businesses right now. He calls it the biggest innovation opportunity in history, a new business model, and he doesn't say that a lot, so. So why 10-year forecasting? We think 10-year forecasting is easier than 2-year forecasting. Can anybody— does anybody want to take a guess why we think that or even disagree with it? You can kind of see more trends that form? Over a 10-year period, thank you. Okay, more trends.
So technology, like, it doubles or triples every 10 years, so it's kind of easier, it's like, it's imagining the future, right? So for example, if you have a phone today, then maybe 20 years from now you can have chips that you can install into your skin, and then it's like kind of easier to imagine that, you know, if this is what you can do at that point, then what the future would look like.
Yeah. It's only one cycle of Marshall for a 2-year forecast and like 6 for 10 years. Yeah, all of the— oh, go ahead. Probably even if there are ups and downs, by 10 years everything will be leveled off. So 10 years is a very good measure to project. Yeah, very good. When you look 2 years out, you're looking a lot at the specifics of like who's going to move when, who's going to win, who's going to do what exactly. And no one can do that. No one can predict the future. I mean, that's what a lot of businesses spend their time on. That's where you should spend your time, frankly, is like what's the next 3 months, what's the next 6 months. Maybe you'd spend a few hours a week like, oh, what's the next 2 years. And so we spend a lot of time looking at that 10 years so that we can help you think about that when you're spending your 5%, 10%, as startups maybe 15% or 20% thinking about that long timeline. And as you just said, yeah, certain things become obvious on a 10-year timeline that aren't on a 2-year timeline. For instance, you almost referenced this directly. Like, in 10 years, an example we use a lot, it's obvious that sensors will be everywhere. They'll be connected. A lot of them will be in our bodies. And they'll be incredibly cheap. These things are obvious on a 10-year timeline. When exactly that's going to happen, we're not sure. So what I'm going to do today is basically give you a— of what we do at Institute for the Future and an introduction to futures thinking. It's not gonna be complete. When it's done, there'll be some things you wanna dig into, understand more, and we can work on that also. And then I'm gonna give you an example of what a part of one of our forecasts looks like. I don't have time to give a full forecast right now, but I at least wanna give you a glimpse at a piece of one. So let's get started. No matter what we say about the future, we know that the next decade is going to be the most tumultuous that we've seen in the last 50 years. And so they have a term for this at the Army War College, VUCA, volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous. Now, Bob Johansen, my colleague, teaches the future generals at the Army War College every year. And he was there before 9/11. And before 9/11, this was the most rigid, traditional, uninspired section of the US Army, you know, just trying to build people up to be the same kind of person they've had every year. And then 9/11 happened, and they realized that they had to change. And now they refer to themselves as VUCA University. So this picture is quite blurry, you might have noticed. The future is not a defined thing. We don't like to pretend that it is. No one can predict it. This is a picture of Marines in Afghanistan riding on saddles designed in the 13th century, wooden, very uncomfortable, communicating with their remote team through satellite phones, trying to communicate with their guides through poor interpreters, and all the while people are trying to kill them. That's the VUCA world. And in business, no one's trying to kill us, and that's a huge difference, don't get me wrong, but we still have to deal with the VUCA world. So in the VUCA world, we have volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguous. And all of you are starting your businesses here, so you are leaders in a few different ways. One, because you're trying to start something new, but also because you are on the forefront. Most of you are trying to start something that's more innovative than usual. And in the VUCA world, for leaders, volatility will need to yield to vision. Uncertainty will need to yield to understanding. Complexity will need to yield to clarity, and ambiguity will need to yield to agility. And there's— you can dig a lot more into this in Bob's book, Leaders Make the Future. He outlines the 10 future leadership skills that leaders will need to thrive in the VUCA world. And out of these, the most important by far is clarity. Clarity is definitely the most important. So, let's take a step back. Like I said, I'm from Institute for the Future. We're a nonprofit think tank in Silicon Valley. We do forecasts of anything you could think of— health, technology, food. We do custom forecasts for some of the largest companies on Earth, and we do forecasts for the general public. And we are a nonprofit. Our mission is, in whatever way possible, help people prepare for the future, because if we think about it first, then we can create the future that we want.
