Living in our current world occasionally seems like a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it society. In such climates, the idea of futurism becomes less of a sci-fi piece of terminology denoting flying cars and spacesuits and more of a true and necessary reality for progress. What does that process entail though? And what is a future safari?
While reporting on reflections from the Consumer Electronics (CES) Show in Las Vegas during a FinextraTV interview, Toddler Moning, head of applied foresights, US Bank, provided some insights by explaining the ‘dirty little secret’ of foresights.
“The dirty little secret is, of course, no one can predict the future, right? But what you can do is you can look at the past and then signals and drivers and trends that are showing up in the present, so that you can consider the many possible little futures in different industry sectors and different areas of people's lives. From that you can create little scenarios [and] little prototypes of ‘well if this continues, what might that mean?’”
At the base of the future is, contradictorily, the past and the lessons it offers us. Futurism or applied foresight is an investigation into the trends and trajectories of previous examples of these past situations. As we discuss the speed of change, it may be understandable to question how relevant the past can be but it is a point of comparison to create new hypotheses from. In some sense, it is more preparation than prediction.
As part of this prioritisation of both past and present to inform the future, Moning places high emphasis on trips called ‘future safaris’: “A future safari is where you kind of get out of the office and you go out and you find the things that are gonna be impacting people's lives and when we do that, we look to try to cover what I call the five Ls.”
Moning then begins to elaborate on what those five Ls are - the full explanation of which can be found in the video itself - latest, lateral, longitudinal, leading and left-field. All of these seek to understand and to define different angles of development and innovation whilst attending industry events.
This approach takes a sort of ‘live-in-the-moment’ attitude to the future, one that asserts that you cannot predict trends or understand what innovations could be around the corner from the isolating bubble of the office. Instead Moning believes that we gather the most value from stepping outside and assessing the real-world impacts of both identified trending topics and left-field possibilities. It is about being challenged as much as it is about being validated and enabling a level of futurism that is more informed than estimated.