With the exception of the occasional pub quiz polymath, most of us have our specialist subjects when the microphone comes out on a Wednesday night at the local. As you might expect, I’m happy to have a crack at science questions. I’m also pretty good on 80s & 90s pop lyrics. But throw me a question on geography, history beyond the last century, or sport, and I will likely flounder.We tend to think we are the subject matter experts in our own workplaces. We spend hours there each day, toiling away at the same problems, getting to know our own industries. Take a pop quiz on your industry and you would probably do pretty well.

Industry experts

But this presents us with two problems.Firstly, everyone else in your industry is a subject matter expert too. How can you differentiate, personally or as a company, when you all have the same subject matter expertise?Secondly, if the answers we need come from knowledge of our own sectors, why do we ever get disruption? Why do companies get defeated by new entrants and challengers, arguably with less accumulated knowledge?

How will business change in the future?

What we’re really looking for is existential threats and exponential opportunities. Some more mundane, marginal ideas might drop out of the process. But it’s these super-scale challenges that come from left field that are so often absent from the to-do list.Until recently I’ve worried that too much of my work ends up being about threats, rather than opportunities. More than once people have said to me that they only see the pressures on their organisation growing. But I’ve realised recently that you can rarely separate existential threats from exponential opportunities.Few organisations are as unique as they think they are. What are challenges for them are almost certainly challenges for their peers. If you can solve an existential threat, you either gain competitive advantage, or create a valuable solution that you can share. Threat becomes opportunity.

The unknown unknowns

In 2002, Donald Rumsfeld was somewhat ridiculed for his statement about ‘known knowns’, ‘known unknowns’, and ‘unknown unknowns’. But in the last fifteen years these terms have become increasingly widely used. They describe neatly the reality for many planning business strategy: you can account for your experience and project forward based on known factors, but it’s much harder to incorporate things from beyond your own experience.In reality, many of the questions we face — and the answers to those questions — come from beyond our own sectors of specialism. Sometimes it’s new ways of working, systems or technologies, developed in an adjacent sphere that might be transformative to our own. It might be someone else’s solution to a very similar problem.These are not ‘unknown unknowns’, but rather ‘unseen unknowns’: questions and answers that exist and are understood, but that are outside of our current domain.

A wider perspective

This is the role of the Applied Futurist: to bring a different, wider perspective. To bring information from beyond the experience of the client, and a framework to make it relevant to their specific environment and challenges.Where in the past we have talked about futurist consulting, I now realise that this term encapsulates three different elements of a service that helps organisations to ‘see, share and respond to’ a vision of the future.

Foresight

The first element is Foresight. Clients want us to tell them what the future looks like for their organisation, industry or segment. We do this in a couple of ways, facilitating programmes like Scenario Planning or running our own Intersections methodology on the client’s behalf.

Communications

A futurist must also craft narratives that compel people to act. That catalyse change. The skills of communication are clearly required by our clients and so they are a defined part of this service. They find their outlet in strategy documents, and marketing campaigns, or in me sitting in front of a camera or microphone or standing on a stage as a futurist speaker.

Strategy

The third part of what was our consulting proposition addresses the inevitable follow-up question that comes when you tell someone about the future. It doesn’t matter if that future is bright or dark, they want to know: “What do we do about it?” The first step in answering this question is to make the organisation fit for change. Few are. The aim is to help them respond faster, not just to the current set of challenges but to future challenges as well.

The unseen unknowns

When looking to the future, part of the challenge is imagining things that are yet to be. But much of it is helping people to see the unseen, channelling lessons from adjacent spaces into their domain so that they can see how they can — and likely will — be applied.The question is often not ‘if’ change will come, but ‘when’. And the answer only comes from looking beyond your own domain.