Where Futuristic Thinking Can Take You

Management consultant Peter Drucker had a great saying concerning futuristic thinking. He said, “The best way to predict the future is to create it”.

What a terrific way to view the future. In some ways, the future causes some of our biggest concerns and worries. Many people stress out over what the future may or may not bring. If we take the aforementioned quote to heart and we make the decision to begin to be creators of our future, rather than reactors of the future, we will need to begin to hone our futuristic thinking skills.

Let’s start to practice. Here a futuristic question to help us get our futuristic thinking caps on:

What’s one thing you could start to do today which would drastically change your life or business five years from now?

Thinking strategically about your life or your organization utilizes some futuristic thinking. Projecting your thoughts toward the future and creating a framework to form the future you want. The answers to the question posed could be to:

1. Learn a new skill

2. Save or invest money

3. Start a business or change your business

4. Begin an exercise program

There are literally thousands of answers to the question. Futuristic thinking involves choosing the answers which best shape the future you want to create. If you don’t like something change it, if you can’t change it, you might consider changing yourself, if you can’t change yourself to that degree, you need more futuristic thinking rather than giving up on the strategic issue.

Successful futuristic thinkers usually follow a process something like this:

1. Decide what they want

2. Spend time thinking about why it’s important to themselves or someone else

3. They take a small step toward making it a reality

4. Step back and think about what they learned on that small step

5. Continue lots of thinking integrating what they learned into developing a next step

6. Take the next step and so on

Perhaps you are already implementing and executing a process similar to this, either knowingly or unknowingly. What would happen if you started? Remember, the best way to predict your future is to create it.