Natalie Pacheco, eid 66340, USAA employee, formal portrait, on blue

Dear Foresight,

I remember the first time I saw you.  My friends and I were gathered around the screen, giggling at how cool you were. We smiled and admired the potential of building a career around studying the future.  I could hardly believe my luck when I found out that we knew each other through a mutual acquaintance. I asked him about you, and he said that he would introduce us at a gathering a few weeks later.  I was so anxious when I drove up to the restaurant. I didn’t know if we would get along. If you would be friendly and welcoming.  As soon as I sat down at the table, I knew you were the one.  We spent all evening talking about our favorite podcasts and the future of bitcoin.  The next day, I spent 8 hours hanging on your every word as you explained blockchain and how it could be used in education. At the end of the day, one of your friends asked me if I had “found my people.” I enthusiastically nodded my head yes. You felt like home even though I had just met you.  Can you believe that Spring Gathering was 4 years ago?

Since then, you’ve taught me so much: the foresight framework, CLA, systems archetypes, how to write a good scenario. But it went deeper than that.  You changed the way I think.  I got to work with people who didn’t live in America. I got to understand the way people think outside of my corporate bubble. You have such a diverse group of people practicing and learning foresight. I’ve loved every minute of being with you, but we’re at a crossroads: I’m graduating.

I worry that we’re going to grow apart.  I work full time and I have for almost 20 years. You know this because you’ve helped me climb the corporate ladder.  I love mentioning you to my bosses, my mentors, and even my employees.  I’m met with squeals of delight and curiosity.  One of my mentors greets me with an energetic “How’s the future looking!?” every time he sees me.  You helped me get my promotion to director.  They wanted someone who could think blue-sky while making incremental changes.  I know you want to get serious, so I asked my boss about you.  They need foresight and what you bring.  We’re in a rapidly changing and highly regulated industry that is influenced by all the categories across STEEP, so I figured I’d ask if I could take 40% of my time to do some foresight work for our current project.  She told me “We have consultants from KPMG that are going to do that.” I don’t like taking no for an answer, so I asked one of the project sponsors. She sighed and said “I just went through a Human Centered Design workshop.  Let’s work with them first.”   It would be easy to say “it’s not you, it’s me”,  but after some of the things I’ve been reading, maybe it’s you.

They say you don’t know how to predict the future, and you agree with that.  Businesses don’t like uncertainty and that’s what you deal in – multiple futures. I know you’re not going to like this, but we’ve been around long enough that maybe it’s time to measure some results. Yes, it’s risky, because we might be wrong more often than not, but don’t we want to know if that’s the case?  Then we can look at our own blind spots. Sometimes the things you say about companies and the plausible makes people angry or afraid. Don’t let go of that,  but use your compassion to help these companies know what to do next.  Even though it might seem like you’re just fueling stockholder profit, you actually keep people employed by helping companies better anticipate change.  I know you want to make the world a better place.  You love focusing on sustainability and trying to pull away from the western capitalist view. You want to move the world from power and achievement memes to integral and holistic ones. I get it, but do they?  Just from an American perspective, I’m having a hard time integrating you into my everyday life. They want to see a return on investment. They want to know HOW the companies you worked with used your research and findings to improve their business or mitigate risk but you end up with NDAs and that makes it hard to get the word out.  I want you to be part of my world forever, but I need your help.

You and I both know the future isn’t only about the technology, but they don’t see that yet. Look at all the people that are associated with our field, rightfully so, or not.  They see Ray Kurzweil, Elon Musk, and Michio Kaku.  But those guys are scientists or technologists, not the everyday “grinders” that are trying to find a place for themselves.  Most of the other folks on the speaker circuits are all fluff, but they have sexy websites with big name clients. I still believe we can change the world, but we have infiltrate the machine to break it.  Maybe it’s time to think like a big corporation.  I know we have professional associations, but what have we patented and copyrighted? Can we take a cue from SAFe Agile and promise a way to improve results while selling our own legitimacy in addition to certification? What about a partnership with Human Centered Design?  They are the hot new thing, and they’re interested in us.

Don’t worry, no matter what happens, I’ll keep in touch.  You’ll still see me at least once a year at the Spring Gathering, where we first met. I’m going to try to find a little side work with you to keep us connected.  But maybe one day, I’ll see you holding hands with Ernst & Young, or on a date with Design.  And maybe I’ll be gazing into the syllabus for class in an Executive MBA program or sweating it out with statistics for a Masters in Data & Analytics.  You’ll always be my favorite degree. I hope we can still be friends.

Love always,

Natalie