Futurists plot strategy to stay the course while the world sways. We forecast the changes through which we navigate to align strategy and change to core purpose.
Steady-cams minimize a camera’s movement despite turmoil so that unintended jostles are not filmed. They do not focus on the jostles themselves. Futurists can be a strategy version of steady camera tools by anticipating external absolute changes and managing relative internal changes that maintain important stabilities along the identified goal, true north, the reason for existing.
Vision is independent of shifting context while tactics narrow oscillations around the vision’s trend line. Futurists contribute effectiveness in meeting vision through mapping the right thing despite change. The tactical change that a futurist can be an agent of may be in plotting alignment perpendicular in addition to parallel to divergences.
We do not solely course correct to avoid the reality of crossing medium interfaces: a spaceship entering atmosphere, a spear plunging into water. Strategic foresight is a stabilizing force making minute change for continuity, not with implacable resting momentum but in shifting internal changes’ center of gravity; conserved angular momentum, the constraining forces of a cycle or pendulum, the counter weight.
The work of a futurist can be the “boring” sustaining work, a continued reaching objectives of the established mission through the methods of foresight. Strategizing how not to change absolute direction to maintain the original ‘why’. A Futurist is your organization’s steady-cam.
– Joe Murphy is a former Science Librarian finishing the U.H. MS in Foresight program and wrapping up a concurrent Executive MBA program at SFSU. With a degree in physics, experience as a librarian at Yale U and in the corporate sector (as Director of Client Futures), Joe is passionate about the synthesis and grounding of futures.
