Since its foundation in 1968, the Institute For The Future (IFTF) has been a benchmark for futures studies, foresight, and futures thinking. To mark the Institute’s fiftieth anniversary, Marina Gorbis, still the executive director of IFTF, published “Five Principles for Thinking Like a Futurist,” a key essay for understanding the value and potential of futures thinking through the pivotal points characterizing the mindset of those who daily exercise it to explore possible alternative futures and enable more informed decisions in the present.

Based on her more than twenty years of experience at the Institute For The Future, Marina Gorbis synthesized five fundamental principles for practicing futures thinking:

1. Forget about predictions

2. Focus on signals

3. Look back to see forward

4. Uncover patterns

5. Create a community

Let’s examine them in detail to understand the aspects that make them so crucial in shaping the mindset of a future thinker called to meet the actual needs of organizations.

1 – Forget about predictions

In her exposition of futures thinking’s primary principle, Marina Gorbis warns against those masquerading as futurists who claim to predict the future precisely. Such assertions do not align with futures thinking, a discipline aimed not at precise predictions but at fostering strategic thought to anticipate change by identifying and assessing possible alternative long-term scenarios.

Gorbis contends that accurately pinpointing socio-technological transformations is nearly impossible, although making specific forecasts is more achievable. Her analysis highlights a critical distinction between foresight, the foundation of futures thinking techniques, and forecasting, the basis of predictive analysis techniques.

Forecasting employs past and present data for predictive analysis, enhanced by artificial intelligence and machine learning, facilitating accurate predictions on market demand, stock trends, election outcomes, and other precisely contextualizable specifics.

Contrary to this deterministic outlook, futures thinking explores complex future scenarios without confining itself to present limitations. It employs various scanning techniques to understand long-term interconnections between technology, society, and the economy, preparing organizations for potential scenarios and guiding strategy development towards preferred futures.

Identifying the desired endpoint is crucial for strategic significance, guiding actions toward the chosen direction and allowing for course adjustments as necessary.

The Institute For The Future’s F-I-A framework (Foresight to Insight to Action) simplifies this process. It starts from the premise that successful strategies derive from future insights, using foresight and insight to inform actionable strategies, essentially addressing the critical organizational question: “What actions today will prepare us for or shape the most desirable future direction?”

2 – Focus on signals

Marina Gorbis identifies the second fundamental principle of futures thinking as the capability to focus on and capture signals of the future. It’s vital to understand that future data do not exist; data are historical and current, maintaining predictive relevance until they meet discontinuities in future trajectories.

The futures thinking interest lies beyond the present state’s continuity, diverging from the focus of other valid and mature disciplines. This necessitates a shift in perspective, moving away from the reliance on historical data to embrace curiosity about our surroundings, purely based on signals.

Gorbis emphasizes:

“Future signals surround us today, often as marginal developments that seem strange to observers […] These are the things that grab your attention and provoke questions about their occurrence.”

Futurists must adopt a proactive approach in capturing future and change signals, starting from their daily routines. Signals manifest through various means such as technologies, applications, products, prototypes, research projects, services, experiences, anecdotes, or even personal observations driven by curiosity.
Gorbis uses eBay’s 1995 inception as an illustrative example.

eBay pioneered a system where strangers confidently sell to each other, mitigated by a reputational system that built trust among users. This reputational mechanism, now a foundational aspect of many online commerce platforms, underscores the significance of seller ratings before product evaluations.

The sharing economy has expanded on this concept, normalizing the use of strangers’ cars or homes based on trust provided by a service. What was once seen as impossible and socially risky in 1995 has become standard practice. Few could have anticipated such a shift when eBay first emerged.

Through insightful foresight and investment, eBay transformed into a colossal “sensing organization.” In such organizations, members continually reflect on and share future signals, allowing collective interpretation and feedback crucial for strategic planning.

3 – Look back to see forward

Recognizing that the future holds no certain data, we can still leverage historical data not for prediction, as typical in forecasting, but for anticipating the future through backcasting, a prevalent foresight technique.

The past, often more revealing than the present, offers insights into completed dynamics and recognizable patterns of change that have historically recurred. This principle forms the basis of Marina Gorbis’s concept of “Looking Back to See Forward,” where futurists must employ historical-critical skills to identify patterns that have historically shaped evolution. The future seldom replicates past events but frequently mirrors the patterns influencing its progression.

Marina Gorbis uses the invention of modern printing by Johannes Gutenberg as a poignant example, drawing parallels between this event and contemporary developments like the internet and the metaverse. The resistance to change from significant technological advances reflects a historical constant, with debates on fake news, computational propaganda, and influential technologies mirroring past concerns.

The fifteenth-century printing press revolutionized information dissemination, challenging the Roman Church’s truth monopoly and empowering figures like Martin Luther to spread reformist views. This invention set a precedent for disruptive communication shifts, such as today’s social media, altering information control and public discourse.

By analyzing these historical dynamics, we can identify recurring trajectories, offering future scholars valuable insights to foresee potential changes.

4 – Uncover patterns

Gaining proficiency in identifying and interpreting historical evolutionary patterns paves the way for delineating new ones based on future signals observed across various phenomena. The question arises: how do models of change operate?

The Institute For The Future introduced the Two Curves framework in Ian Morrison’s 1996 book “The Second Curve.” This model posits that during transformative periods, we simultaneously navigate two distinct curves.

The first curve, declining, represents our long-standing experiences, complete with understood rules, dynamics, and data. Its future obsolescence rate, however, remains uncertain.

The second curve, ascending, finds us at its inception, with only initial signals known and much left to the imagination.

Marina Gorbis further explored these concepts in “The Nature of the Future,” distinguishing the first curve as institutional production, reflecting current organizational operations, from the second curve’s concept: socialstructed creation. Wikipedia exemplifies this, laying the groundwork for Web 2.0 and showcasing the power of user-generated content to surpass any single organization’s capabilities in both scale and diversity.

The Wikipedia Foundation, with a modest team, leverages millions worldwide to produce content for billions of users, a feat unattainable in previous eras, made possible by the internet and open-source information culture.

Transitioning from the first to the second curve, and navigating their intersection to explore alternative futures, demands a mental and approach shift. Gorbis likens this to the mindset of immigrants venturing into new territories, where learning a new language and culture is necessary for innovation. Thus, futurists are imagined as immigrants into futures, where leaving the comfort of the present is essential to discovering uncharted paths that lie a decade ahead.

5 – Create a community

Marina Corbis humorously dismisses the notion of self-proclaimed gurus claiming to foresee the future as “futurists” who have had a mountain-top revelation.
She asserts that futures thinking is not about solitary visions but is deeply collaborative, requiring the inclusion of diverse stakeholder perspectives and knowledge for authentic representation and anticipation.

Exploring potential futures single-handedly lacks credibility because it misses the collaborative essence of foresight. Especially in corporate settings, having futures thinking facilitators who engage with experts across socio-demographic, historical-cultural, economic, technological, and organizational fields is crucial for navigating change processes.

Marina Gorbis envisions futures thinking as collective intelligence, drawing on future signals within a sensing organization where individuals with varied expertise contribute. This diversity enriches exploration, leading to more realistic and credible future visions.

Futurists are not solitary geniuses with miraculous foresight but scholars applying multidisciplinary research to help organizations anticipate change through team coordination. The future of organizations increasingly relies on fostering a community among its members to shape desirable futures.