The end of 2025 closes out my first official year practicing strategic foresight as a freshly ordained consultant at FTSG.
Ironically, had I read that sentence a year ago, I would have been dumbfounded. It’s not that this career transition surprised me, it’s that I’d have told you I was already practicing foresight. I had been for years!
It is true – I had been doing futures work long before I took this job. But, as it turns out, I still had many lessons to learn about strategic foresight as a practice and a perspective.
Everyone has a different path into futures work, seeing that it’s not something most people hear about when first mapping out a career plan. I arrived through a job in trend forecasting, where I was focused on predicting consumer trends just a few years ahead.
However, over time, my curiosity grew. I wanted to see a bit farther out, exploring not just what might be unfolding next season but in the next decade. To get those answers meant acquiring the proper tools and methodologies to support a longer lens outlook, which brought me to FTSG.
I often explain our work as a giant thought experiment: you gather the right research, apply the right frameworks, and use creativity to think both expansively and strategically. Honestly, it’s an ideal job. Until of course you realize certain futures are quite terrifying… More on that later.
There’s a certain ambiguity to thinking about something so fundamentally uncertain like the future. While there can definitely be a lot of mystery around foresight as a field, we at FTSG are committed to making foresight clear, accessible, and grounded.
Ultimately, we believe that, while not everyone is going to be a foresight expert, everyone can and should adopt a foresight mindset. A mindset that encourages expansive thinking and intentional decision-making. In that vein, I want to share a more personal perspective on what it’s like to have this very unique job title – and why you might consider picking up the practice too.
To anyone interested in a peek behind the curtain, here are some of the many realizations, revelations, and “I don’t want to think about that anymore” moments I had in a year as a foresight expert.
Lesson 1: Get Comfortable with Contradictions
To start off, when your job is to research, question, and plan for a future world, every day can elicit a different reaction. Some days you leave a workshop feeling electrified with possibility. During one session with an environmental management group, industry competitors came together to identify where they could collaborate in anticipating and mitigating climate disasters in their communities. It was a powerful reminder of how this work can multiply its impact by bringing as many parties as possible to the table. After all, even competitors can mutually benefit from contributing to a better future.
Other days you’re staring straight into the apocalypse – in varying terms. For clients, this could mean coming to terms with a future that could be catastrophic to their business. For me as a consultant, this could mean connecting the dots to a future world I have no desire to live in, but need to consider and propose as a potential outcome.
Futures work can be exhilarating and anxiety-inducing in equal measure. It demands imagination, but it also requires confronting what might change, what might go wrong, and what might have to be sacrificed to get there. The constant whiplash between optimism and realism, between hope and caution, starts to create a new kind of mental wavelength that digests information and reprocesses it as it pertains to a multitude of futures.
Good news! When you can finally learn to hold multiple possibilities at once without collapsing into either panic or idealism, this means you’re onto something. Rational and informed decisionmaking will always be the best tool to prepare for any future outcome.
Lesson 2: Forget the Trends, Lean Into Uncertainty
The next lesson was interesting for me to learn as a former trend forecaster: The more you work with trends – analyzing them, tracking them, sourcing them – you realize how much most of the world gets wrong about them. Countless trend reports and LinkedIn “hot takes” like to position trends as wayfinding points for businesses to direct their sails around. Magic phrases with fancy buzzwords and alliterative titles are written to feel like the perfect panacea to whatever business trouble you may find yourself facing.
Yes, we will always need to track trends to understand larger patterns in our world, but after a year of practicing foresight, I’m more interested in uncertainties – unknown shifts over which no singular organization, government, business or person has total control.
Rather than writing another trend report on the Great Wealth Transfer, wouldn’t it be more valuable to question how demographic shifts (e.g., lower birth rates, blended families, longevity practices) could reshape inheritance patterns in radically different ways? Rather than just identifying “privacy-by-design” as a 2025 trend, why not examine the uncertainty of whether privacy could become designed to be a universal right or rather, commercialized as an elite, purchasable luxury?
Of course, focusing on the unknowns doesn’t sound as sexy. It’s much more comfortable to point to trends that are known and studied than uncertainties that indicate potential upheaval, chaos, and change. But isn’t that ultimately what matters?
Lesson 3: Let the Work Shape the Method
Keeping in mind the rising importance of uncertainties, exploring the future should always be an evolving process. Any hard and fast methodology fails to accommodate changing patterns of research, business needs, and future considerations.
In my first year at FTSG, I’ve enjoyed developing and experimenting with new frameworks for applying strategic foresight to my own background in demographic shifts and consumer identity. This work has led me to develop new ways of mapping demographic shifts, designing identity-sensitive uncertainties, and refining the exercises we use to help clients understand how people and their behaviors might evolve across different futures.
Testing these frameworks has reminded me that foresight isn’t about offering the perfect prediction on a silver platter – only a crystal ball could promise that. Instead, foresight earns its value through evidence and iteration over time. With each cycle of trial and error, the work becomes more reliable, and so does our confidence in using it to guide better long-term decisions.
Conclusion
This year has demonstrated to me that strategic foresight is relevant to everyone. I’ve been lucky to act as an advisor and administrator for two of our educational programs – our CEO Amy Webb’s graduate course at NYU Stern School of Business, as well as an online Certified Design Futurist course in partnership with the International Interior Design Association. From business students to designers, it’s comforting to know more trained foresight experts will use this methodology in their next ventures and spread more future-prepared thinking wherever they go.
Because ultimately, this doesn’t need to be your day job to use foresight. With the proper tools and training, it’s a practice for anyone who wants to feel more prepared for the future – whatever that may bring.
