A Futurist and Sci-Fi Author Walk Into A Bar..

Effective futurists disrupt conventional wisdom and shape new cultural paradigms—not through reports and frameworks, but by creating provocative artifacts that push us to question, engage, and rethink what the future could be.

Spend enough time trying to decipher what people mean when they ask, “Are you a futurist?” and you start questioning what it actually is to be a futurist. I’ve seen folks with foresight certifications — armed with methodologies, frameworks, and toolkits — convinced that enough trend data and predictive models will let them chart a smooth course through the messy terrain of tomorrow. They’re steeped in the language of probabilities, disruptions, and strategic horizons, conjuring futures that organizations can consume without indigestion.

But this tightly-coupled, credentialed approach to thinking about the future feels, to be honest, like a brilliant way to snuff out our collective ability to imagine expansively. Certifying foresight feels like building a fence around what should be a wild, boundless expanse of possibilities. Why try to predict a future if the most probable one is only an extrapolation of what we already know? What if the thing we should be imagining is the thing that no trendline can capture? The thing so unexpected, so unforeseen, that no “3 Horizons” gizmo could have anticipated it? This, I argue, is where the true work of envisioning futures lies—not in making sense of patterns but in allowing ourselves to imagine wildly, creatively, without the safety net of structure.

Consider that futures, in one form or another, are imagined worlds brought back for us to ponder, build toward (whether habitable and buildable or not), anticipate, debate, and work to avoid. These are futures fashioned from the imagination of authors like Arthur C. Clarke, Cory Doctorow, Ursula K. Le Guin, Neil Stephenson, Ayn Rand, P.K. Dick, Bruce Sterling, John Muir (not that one—the one who wrote The Velvet Monkeywrench), Marge Piercy, Richard Brautigan, Richard Powers, and on and on.

(There is the ‘Torment Nexus’ issue, which we’ll ignore nor lay some kind of value assessment as to whether or not any of the work from any of these authors are worlds we want to inhabit, or worlds we want to avoid. That’s not my point here, which is rather that they each may be doing more of what futurists wish they could do — create futures imaginaries that shape the dreams/dreads we have of possible future worlds.)

These writers weren’t operating from the comfort of foresight certification courses. They didn’t start with trend data and end with a meticulously constructed future scenario, PowerPoint deck, strategy assessment, or some kind of up-and-to-the-right graph or Venn Diagram.

Instead, they created futures that, in one way or another, broke us out of our present-day thinking. These speculative worlds are rich, complex, unsettling—and, crucially, wildly different from one another because they emerged from unique, creative imaginations, not from an assembly line of strategic foresight frameworks.

The point isn’t that “creative people are better than certified futurists.” It’s that true futures thinking requires more than an analytic approach. It requires speculative leaps, playful recombinations, and a willingness to ask, “What if?” The ability to think beyond the obvious isn’t something you acquire by slogging through a foresight certification program. You cultivate it by living a life curious enough to ask inconvenient questions, brave enough to challenge the status quo, and imaginative enough to conjure visions that are strange, compelling, and often unruly.

Take Gary Hustwit’s simple yet profound question: “Why do films have to be the same every time you watch them?” It’s like the kind of question a child would ask an adult, expecting that they have an answer. It’s the beautifully juvenile ‘Why?’ question that can change worlds — or induce the bewilderment of adults who have lost their ability to ‘Imagine Harder’ and beyond the limits of the world they have inhabited for their entire life, without questioning ‘what else?’

It’s a subtle and radical notion that upends our assumptions about cinema itself. But what makes it powerful is that Hustwit didn’t leave this question to fester and molder in a foresight report or a PowerPoint deck. He turned the question into a tangible artifact that included this Brain One contrivance designed by Teenage Engineering and the generative output created from a series of manipulations and algorithms operating on an enormous corpus of material to create an instance of what a documentary about Brian Eno *could be. This output, — the ‘film’ “Eno” — is something we can experience, talk about, and be transformed by. It is Gary’s glimpse of a possible future. He effectively took a possible future and made it real enough to provoke a rethinking of what visual storytelling could be.

Consider my oft-used example: Bill Bowerman, who sparked a billion-dollar jogging culture by writing a book called “Jogging” when such was not a thing. No foresight structure or certified methodology guided him. It was an act of vision and audacity. Like Hustwit, Bowerman wondered ‘What if?’ and turned it into a ‘What is,’ creating a new market and a cultural shift without a degree in foresight or an MBA in innovation.

This is why I say that the best “futurists” don’t settle for white papers, industry reports, or slide decks. They make futures tangible. They craft artifacts from imagined worlds. They create provocations that compel us to feel what the world might be like, otherwise. They ask unanticipated and perhaps even beautifully childish questions that defy linear answers (or make us uncomfortable that we don’t have a good answer such that we should ‘because that’s the way we do things!’) And then, through some magic of creative practice, they turn these questions into something that we can hold, see, taste, wear, or experience—a fragment of a possible world brought back for us to consider, debate, or reject.

So why, then, do we expect that the future comes from following a script of structured workshops, strategic models, and certification programs? It’s a self-defeating loop: innovation comes from imagining differently, and pushing past that sense that data, evidence, certainty are prized over expansive unexpected probes and explorations. We should be seeking audacious levels of unsettlement. Plausible scenarios are what everyone else is thinking. What’s most valuable is something strange enough to make us uncomfortable. This is the principle that undergirds Near Future Laboratory and why I say I make products from your future.

Because the future—if we’re truly honest—is a strange, unexplored, uncomfortable territory that has its own quirky physics, behaviors, norms, expectations. And to navigate it, we need to make room for more unruly ways of thinking. We need people who are willing to make a mess, to ask what else might be possible, and to create the beautifully unsettling artifacts that leave us questioning not just what’s around the corner, but what the corner itself might become.