“This is the futurist’s dilemma: Any believable prediction will be wrong. Any correct prediction will be unbelievable. Either way, a futurist can’t win. He is either dismissed or wrong.” So writes Kevin Kelly is this thoughtful piece.
As a professional futurist, it’s a dilemma I struggle with on a daily basis as I help my clients think about the future.
Here are a few approaches I take:
- I encourage them to develop a “future bias”
- I tell them to get impractical
- I use history and simple analogies to explain how the impossible becomes possible, and
- I tell to always have a healthy disregard for what might be impossible in the future.
If you have ideas, I’d love to hear.
