How to Predict the Future

Leave your "Where's my flying car?" jokes at the door.

Cassidy Steele Dale writes to equip you with the forecasts, foresight skills and perspectives, and tools you may need to create a better, kinder world.

And one of those ways is to teach you how to forecast and to foresee.

Read below but come back to this and precisely this: forecasting the future is merely about arranging your knowns and unknowns about the future in smart ways.

Yes, I’m sharing trade secrets. Why? Because every futurist in the world wants you to know them so you too can help create a better, kinder world.

Got it? Good.

When most people try to picture what a futurist looks like, they tend to imagine some crazy-haired, wild-eyed, bespectacled prognosticator in a black turtleneck ranting about flying cars and that all our houses will fold up into briefcases and flap off like bats into the night or whatever. (This hits too close to home. I feel attacked. I feel like I just attacked myself.)

The reality isn’t that. (We don’t wear black turtlenecks.)

Professional futurists forecast; hucksters predict. Point prediction — predicting that some exact thing will happen at some exact time — is usually impossible. Forecasting the outcomes of trends, though, is very doable.

Forecasting futures is similar to forecasting the weather. It’s done broadly. (Don’t laugh — but you immediately see the difference between predicting and forecasting now, don’t you?) Meteorologists look at a storm system that’s approaching from the west, the wind currents that could push the storm southward, and the mountain range that’s between the storm and you. Then they sit back and posit that (1) the storm system could come in low enough that the mountains block it and the rain drops on the western side of the range, or (2) the storm blows straight over the mountains hard enough that the wind doesn’t move it southward at all and the storm clouds dumps their rain on your head, or (3) the storm comes over the range but the winds push it southward enough that it dumps its rain on your southern neighbors.

But since we consumers expect and demand a single point-prediction the meteorologist offers up a single weather forecast. And when that forecast turns out to be wrong? We roll our eyes and say the weather people are idiots. What actually happened? One of the other two forecasts.

Professional futurists give you all three forecasts and help you contingency-plan and strategize for all three. They help you foresee the possible circumstances you might plausibly find yourselves in — in broad terms — and what the ramifications of each might be.

Take it an extra step: A futurist helps you plan for the rain but also helps you figure out what seeds are already in the soil beneath your feet that could grow if the rain hits them. Good futurists don’t just help you decide whether to take an umbrella; they can help you plan for a harvest or a forest you didn’t realize was possible.

Here’s an overview of how to forecast — a skeleton of how to do it that we’ll flesh out in future newsletters. I’ll use as a test case my Scenarios for Futures of American Democracy.

This particular forecasting technique is called scenario planning.

Step 1: Decide and scope what you want to forecast.

Get this wrong and you get everything wrong. You’ll want to forecast the conditions on which you as an actor or an organization will face and have to reckon with. You forecast the landscape you’ll operate on rather than about yourself. Future landscapes first; strategies for those futures second.

Do not presume you will be the determinant of that future landscape no matter how big or influential you think you are.

• Once upon a time, a Boeing executive approached a futurist to ask for a project on Futures of Boeing and the futurist refused. He said he’d do Futures of the Aerospace Industry but not on Boeing itself. The Boeing executive said “But we are the biggest player —” and the futurist cut him off and said “You don’t control the aluminum, petroleum, or pilot supply. Aerospace manufacturers have to accept what you get from those supply chains and producers. I can forecast what you’re apt to get. I can do Futures of the Aerospace Industry. You’re only a part of that industry.” I don’t recall the Boeing executive took the conversation any farther than that.

• The United States Postal Service made a similar (but worse) mistake than this in the 1980s and early 1990s: they failed to understand what industry they were truly in and how THAT industry was changing. The Postal Service didn’t consider what the Senate’s efforts at the time to open the Defense Department’s intranet platform to public use — a platform primarily meant to nuclear-war-proof communication within the United States Government — would do to the communications industry. (That intranet became The Internet.) Thus the Postal Service saw itself not as in the communications industry as much as in the letter-and-parcel-transit industry. They saw themselves in competition with FedEx and UPS rather than with email. So when they considered the future (if at all) they were thinking about futures of transit of physical things rather than the futures of transit of messages. Had they understood and prepared for email then today every American’s email address would end with @usps.gov rather than @gmail.com .

• Similarly I’m sometimes asked for Futures of a Christian denomination in the United States. The first thing I have to do is ask if they mean Futures of, say, the Methodist faith tradition or of the denominational structures of the United Methodist Church. Regardless I then step back and talk about Futures of Americans’ Approaches to Spirituality or Futures of American Christianity and then say that in those, say, three scenarios the future for the Methodist faith tradition looks good in one of them because Americans’ approaches to spirituality match for Methodists’ approach or bad in another future because there will be a mismatch. (I realize neither of these are monoliths but you take my point about what scale of question to ask and how.)

Forecast what’s larger than yourself that will be the landscape on which you will live, function, and operate on. And check your ego at the door.

For my Scenarios for American Democracy I simply ask “What are potential futures for American democracy through 2040 and what would the United States look like in each case?” Simple as that.

• That question requires, though, a description of a healthy, functioning democracy that can serve as criteria or victory conditions for whether democracy ‘wins’ by the end of each scenario. So I added a section on that to the preamble.

Step 2: Identify the major trends emerging and already under way that will undeniably impact the future of what you’re forecasting.

The trends professional futurists look for are tidal-wave-sized or the currents deep within a river. When futurists look for trends they’re looking for what are also sometimes called megatrends, macrotrends, drivers of change or change drivers, or TINAs (as in “There Is No Alternative to…”).

The idea is to identify the major muscle movements rather than the details of what’s emerging or on the way. Like the aging-through of generations through American society like larger or smaller meals that have been consumed by a giant snake. The snake (or American society) has to reckon with the size and nature of each meal one stage of its body at a time. (I’m not going to continue that image to its conclusion. Which is poop.)

So the arrival of, say, the Baby Boomers or the Millennial Generation (which is larger than the Boom) — with the size and tendencies of each — would itself be a major driver of change for whatever industry they make contact with.

Some industries may be transformed — for the better, disrupted, or killed — by the emergence of one or more of the next waves of technology. So you’d identify the emergence of those categories of technology not necessarily a specific technological breakthrough because the simple emergence of a superior technology doesn’t automatically mean it will be adopted. (Advice to past self: Don’t buy Betamax.)

For my Scenarios for American Democracy the trends I identified were (1) changes in American demographic trends and internal migration, (2) GOP ongoing intransigence and its retrenchment strategies of the past two decades, and (3) the ramifications of the American grand strategy of prioritizing the growth of its economic engines for world peace and globalization reasons. Macro, macro, macro.

But wait, aren’t those extremely deep trends? Maybe too deep? No, they’re about right. Just like you need to scope your question at least one order of magnitude wider than that of you as an actor or organization, you also need to search for trends that are one or two layers deeper than most people consider. Here’s a way of picturing that, from The Long Now Foundation. The surface layers move and change quickly; the deeper layers are more profound, change more slowly, and are the deep currents and sometimes the constraints on the futures that may be possible in the near term.

But how do I know whether I’ve found all the trends I need to find? (1) Talk to every person who’s an expert on your topic as possible, then talk to the renegades, then talk to the journalists who are observers of your topic, then (2) do the same for everyone who’s an expert/renegade/observer of all the trends that impact that topic in every STEEPM or STEEPER category around it.

What? OK, wait, to back up: why do economic forecasts forecast so badly? Because they’re looking only at economic factors and indicators; they never pick their heads up to see the hurricane about to absolutely pulverize the local economy in the first place.

So what you do is try to look 360 degrees for all the possible macrotrends that can impact the future of your topic.

The STEEP in both acronyms are the relevant (1) Social-Cultural trends, (2) Technological, (3) Economic, (4) Environmental, and (5) Political trends. Some people add (6) Military trends. I instead add (6) Existential, a bucket for when a society is apt to face a change-of-societal-nature challenge or reason-for-being question, and (7) Religious trends. (Far, far more on these in future newsletters.)

Step 3: Identify the most critical variables for the future of what you’re looking at.

Here’s a crude example: Let’s say you’re 40 years old and we’re going to do a project on the Futures of You for, say, five years from now. The first major driver of change is simply aging: five years from now you will be 45 years old. (Remember another name for a driver of change is a TINA: There Is No Alternative to…?) There is no alternative to that in five years you will be five years older: you will be 45 years old.

Wait: there IS an alternative to you being 45 years old in five years — you could be dead! Alive-or-dead is a variable. And thus you’d have two scenarios: (1) alive and 45 or (2) dead at maybe 42. What are your plans for each case?

Welcome to critical variables.

Critical variables are the most important open questions or unmade decisions about the future of a topic. If trends are your major knowns then variables are your major unknowns. Whether, say, the major players in an industry merge into conglomerates and monopolies or whether they decide to diversify and specialize. Or whether the local governments and alliances in a region cooperate to plan regionally or compete with each other instead.

Usually there only a few giant, core questions ahead for an industry or a topic. If there’s two, you can set each of the two on an X axis and a Y axis to generate a set of quadrants. For my Scenarios of American Democracy I posited that the two most critical variables — the outcomes of which would most fundamentally shape the future of democracy in the United States — were (1) whether the Democratic Party would capture the majority/bulk of the American electorate or marginalize itself through extremism and (2) whether the Republican Party would do the same.

Step 4: Generate structured scenarios of the future.

Scenarios are basic storylines of what happens in one or another plausible future. They’re the result of arranging your knowns and unknowns about the future of something.

The way I generated my Scenarios for the Future of American Democracy was by intersecting those two critical variables to yield four quadrants. They looked like this (but go back and read the whole post to see how I arrived at them — and what I posited afterward.)

What intersecting the two axes/variables gave me were the scenario themes which I rendered into those four scenario/quadrant titles. How did I generate the narratives within each quadrant?

Step 5: Within each scenario, generate a futures wheel/implications wheel to flesh out each scenario’s future ‘world.’

A futures wheel is a brainstorming technique created by Jerome Glenn in the early 1970s to imagine the first, second, third implications and beyond of a development. You set the development itself as the central bubble or hub in a diagram and then imagine each of the immediate implications or subsequent developments as their own spokes off of that central hub — or more precisely, as new hubs at the end of their own spokes. Then you treat each of those first-order implications as hubs for the next iteration of spokes — second-order implications.

As novelist Frederik Pohl once put it, “A good science-fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam.”

Here’s what a futures wheel looks like in the abstract (thanks to KnowledgeWorks).

A futures wheel helps you ask “What happens after what comes next? And what happens after that?”

Do a futures wheel for each scenario to get a full sense of what could happen within each future. An hour of living within each future via this technique will give you a decade’s worth of how the world transforms there… and how different from today’s present it will be.

Step 6: Plan for each future. All of them.

Just do it. Even and especially for the ones you think are unlikely. In my life as a futurist about 50% of the time the scenario my client group thought was least-likely-to-near-improbable and so they didn’t plan for it is the future that emerged. Welcome to weirdness — but totally foreseeable — the 2023 of today is from the impossibility it seemed for most everyone from 1995. And yet here we are.

So that’s how you do it. That’s how you forecast the future. Does it work? Yes, it does. Forecasts I made almost 30 years ago are the realities of today, sometimes down to the details.

It’s just that easy. Yes it absolutely is. And some of you reading this right now are going to pick this up and do better than the professionals.

And no, it’s not easy. But you’re good for it. Get started on something you care about. Keep going. Ask me or a futurist nearby if you need help. We’re around.