Summary of the video

There is one thing that I learned from you, which is you always use the word future in plural form.

Yes. When I bring it back, you know, to parents asking a kid, you know, what do you want to be in the, in the future when you will be big? And usually what we expect is one answer, you know? My understanding of the, the foresight guy, he will not ask, what do you want to be , but it is more like what are the possible jobs you could do in the future or that you'd like to work on or that you imagine you could do? Is it a bit, this change that happens?

So that's brilliant. You really got it.

The number one thing you want to do when you're thinking about the future is to escape what we call the mono future.

Okay? This idea of a linear future that unfolds ahead of you, that you will walk into there is this continuity.

Okay? And that has many implications because, Adding an S to futures mm-hmm. Is where everything should be different. So a customer will, will ask you, I wanna do strategic foresight, and then you show up with like six, seven different possible futures and they will go, oh, no, no, no, no. That's not what I wanted.

I want you to tell me what will happen. And that's the second thing about futurist is that we do not provide predictions. Okay. So For example, in, in French, we have ology. Mm-hmm. Theology is in science and study of how our system will collapse. Yeah. And for a futurist, that is a, a no goal. We can't compute that because methodologically or be ontologically, we cannot have only one future.

No. Okay. And. This notion that the future will unfold in, in a very specific way, cannot be taken into account. We wanna have a range of possible future, okay? But it's not always easy to escape this idea that the future will be more technology, more progress better linear going forward, and that is so strong in the way we think about the future.

I always tell my students, you cannot find the future on Unsplash. It doesn't exist. It looks like the past. It is the past. Even if you ask an AI mid journey mm-hmm. To imagine what the future could be, it's struggle. Images will be blurry because it doesn't know what should I take into account, where are my references?

So that's where we wanna go. And then think about the future. And it's very difficult for a company to escape the idea of predictions and the idea of, I would say techno driven consumer insights with the scope of three to six months, that's not strategic for this consumer usage. So it's always very important as a futurist when you're requested to do any.

So do you really want. You open up and think how might tomorrow be different? Okay. And what if tomorrow there's something key about your business? It's gone. And some customers will tell you, but that's not possible. Say, okay, try to remember how fast you remove CDs out of your life. How long did it take for you to phase out CDs?

And some people will tell you, oh, I'm here.

Well, that could be your industry. What would happen? What would you do? How would you reimagine what you're good at in the future? Where you're good at something but you don't do it in the same way? That's the basic of a foresight approach to a business strategy.

So if you take a business model canvas, you have nine blocks, you could say, just change one block. That one is gone.

What could be different?