Flash Foresight
Have you ever wished you could predict the future—and be right? What would it be like if you could clearly see critical changes in the months and years ahead, and use those glimpses to shape that future, instead of just letting it unfold by default?
You can accurately predict enough of the future to make all the difference. In fact, you can hone your ability to trigger a burst of accurate insight about the future and use it to produce a new and radically different way of doing things. Called a flash foresight, this is about looking into the future and transforming it into a new paradigm for solving “impossible” problems, unearthing “invisible” opportunities, and running extraordinarily successful businesses in the twenty-first century.
In my new book Flash Foresight, I share seven principles that can make invisible opportunities visible. Here is a brief overview of each:
START WITH CERTAINTY
Many people confuse cyclical change (the stock market) with linear change (population growth), and don’t know how to distinguish hard trends (baby boomers are aging) from soft trends (there won’t be enough doctors to treat aging baby boomers). However, by distinguishing what’s certain (future fact) from what’s uncertain (future maybe), you can make accurate predictions.
ANTICIPATE
Base your strategies on what you know about the future. Based on the certainty of hard trends, ask yourself, “What are the problems I am about to have?” Then look for creative ways to solve those problems before they happen.
TRANSFORM
Use technology-driven change to your advantage. Transformation means doing something utterly and radically different. Using hard trends, how do you expect your business of profession to transform in the next few years? Your answer will help you start crafting strategies to transform how you sell, market, communicate, collaborate, and innovate.
TAKE YOUR BIGGEST PROBLEM AND SKIP IT
The key to unraveling your organizations’ most intractable problems often lies in recognizing that the problem confronting you is not the real problem. The real problem lies hidden behind the distraction of what you think the problem is.
GO OPPOSITE
Look where no one else is looking to see what no one else is seeing and do what no one else is doing. When searching for the real problem you want to address, it’s not always easy to know where to look. One way to help tease that insight to the surface is to note what everyone else is thinking and doing—and then look in the opposite direction.
REDEFINE AND REINVENT
Identify and leverage your uniqueness in new and powerful ways. Forget competing; instead, leapfrog the competition by redefining anything and everything about your business. Additionally, decommoditize continuously—look for creative ways to make the mundane exceptional and transform the normal into the extraordinary.
DIRECT YOUR FUTURE
Directing your future is the conscious exercise of your creative capacity to envision and rewrite your future life and career that wraps all the other flash foresight principles together. You become what you dream; therefore, what are you dreaming?
CHART YOUR COURSE
Having accurate flashes of insight about the future are the key to successful innovation and accelerating growth. By committing to these seven principles, you’ll keep your company and yourself ahead of the curve so you can navigate a solution before the rest of the world even sees a problem coming.
Daniel Burrus, one of the world's leading technology forecasters, business strategists, and author of six books Copyright 2011. Author retains copyright. All Rights Reserved.
