What is a Futurist

Climbing the proverbial ladder to success is made up of two parts. You can be striving towards moving upwards. You can also be looking at where you have come from. Both parts are essential to a growing company.

In many aspects, a futurist forecasts for an entity in order to maximize success. Futurists create contingency plans for impending disasters, advise people on emerging global trends, design products to develop in tandem with previously unforeseen potentialities, and help companies adapt to change. With that said, a futurist will have a hard time picking a specialty. Maybe it is Artificial Intelligence and technology, climate change, political strategy, economics, or real estate. But in order to understand the outcome of one such discipline, it would be advantageous to understand the interplay between it and the other factors that can contribute to hard-to-foresee outcomes. For instance, real estate could be impacted by natural disaster. A futurist could implement different roofing ideas in a geographic location traditionally not susceptible to inclement weather in anticipation of climate change. A futurist real estate professional could also embrace technologies that are on the rise. Some technologies "on the rise" could eventually become obsolete, but a good futurist would anticipate that. Remember the LaserDisc? Hopefully, you can see the value in a futurist with that example. Someone not in touch with reality, may simply rely on marketing to create a trend. The average consumer may engage in that trend. But the futurist may foresee that trend's failure.

If futurists are forecasters, then what would be the difference between a futurist and a meteorologist? Futurists take broader, long-term approaches into account. Climate change may be a specialty, but the futurist will always have an interdisciplinary understanding of scenarios to pull from. And climate change is technically a bigger topic than atmospheric science.

Futurists have traditionally been seen as prophetic guides. In many ways, yes, they can predict what others cannot see. But their predictions are not based on a feeling or some mystical power. Their predictions are based on calculating odds and the highest of educated guesses. If you are a movie person, think of the art of a smart futurist as less like Matthew McConaughey's character in Two for the Money and more like the sabermetricians in Moneyball. However, since a futurist deals more in the long-term, it is still vastly exploratory.

Never underestimate a person who spends most of their time anticipating trends. Futurists are curious people who constantly research various subjects. The best way to anticipate the future is to analyze history. Also, futurists must be creative people. They have to come up with the hypotheses that very few are likely to see. Writers constantly engage in research of various topics. A science-fiction writer would be a strong futurist...for obvious reasons.

In an everchanging global landscape, futurists have always been important. It is becoming even more obvious nowadays that futurists can be valuable contributors to society. Futurists are necessary to further our world during trying times.