In October 2007, I started this blog. I had pent-up ideas to share about foresight. Over 10 years, I’ve posted 236 times.
Has it been valuable? Plenty of readers benefited. But I know I gained the most. Thinking through and writing the posts let me to refine how I communicate about foresight. And I know that better communication fueled others’ interest and work.
Creating the posts also prepared me for teaching and advising organizations on foresight: its power, its essentialness, and how people can do it with the constraints they face in their organizations.
Foresightculture turned out to be about 95% about the processes of foresight and 5% about “what is the future?” The “how” was a natural fit for me and was where I had the most interest in sharing my thinking.
Blogging clarified for me how I think about foresight, and evolved in tandem with my sense of the role I play as a futurist. That role today is more about being the guide to how to change minds and understand change than it is foreseer of the future. When I sit with others to help them, I’m first and foremost there to help them change how they think.
Here are some insights from the ten years:
- In foresight, it is the journey that matters, not the forecast, report, or briefing at the end.
- Foresight is about changing minds. What you change them to may be critical for you, but the first order of business is unlocking people’s thinking.
- My readers are often alone in their quest for clarity on the future. They need allies and they need techniques.
- Foresight seems difficult and mysterious to people. People want grab-and-go tools and instructions, not theory. That has made my posts on environmental scanning, SWOTs analysis, and scenarios “best sellers” on my blog.
- People want to visualize what foresight is, what it means, and how it’s done. They gain from simple, draw-it-on-the-nearest-whiteboard doodles that give people an “ah ha!”. My favorite is “The Mother of All Futures Diagrams“.
- People like “listicles”. They know that they will get something pared down to essentials from posts like “6 Foresight Hacks” or “8 things leaders should know about strategic foresight“.
- There is no one-size-fits-all explanation or approach to foresight. I write about the same things again and again. Why? Because as I lead workshops, and have conversations, and read and ponder, I discover new angles to come at the same concepts. Someone who didn’t find the last one useful, may find the new one lights them up.
So I will keep going. If I learn and others learn too, it’s well worth what is pleasurable time spent.
Thank you for reading.
