What next? How future gazing became big business

With robots taking over and 3D-printed pizza for tea, the future is not for the faint-hearted. Yet, appetites abound for the continual stream of news about what tomorrow could bring – from the flying cars we’ll use to nip to the shops to the hi-tech homes we’ll live in.

Future gazing is becoming an increasingly popular pastime. “Innovation and the future are part of the cultural discourse; it’s the kind of thing that millennials read about on the plane, from popular business books to magazines about innovation,” says trends forecaster Lucie Greene, the worldwide director of the innovation group at ad agency JWT. In Greene’s view, this is in part due to the celebrity status of Silicon Valley luminaries such as Mark Zuckerberg.

Our preoccupation with future trends could also be put down to the fact that what was once the stuff of sci-fi, like robot vacuum cleaners, has become a reality. And the speed of change is enough to prompt feelings of disorientation; what one of the world’s most eminent futurists, Alan Toffler, termed “future shock”.

The way the present and future seem to be converging is also spooking the business world. “Everything that is the future looks as if it’s going to happen next month,” says Gerd Leonhard, CEO of The Futures Agency. “It’s creating quite a bit of panic among companies that have been laggards in sectors like banking, insurance and energy.”

All of which has made future gazing central to business operations, with companies from Proctor & Gamble to Spotify employing in-house teams of future gazers, and firms such as l’Oreal and Unilever launching their own incubators to develop new products. Many big firms also consult the growing number of firms and consultancies dedicated to analysing and pre-empting the future.

Trevor Hardy, the CEO of forecasting consultancy The Future Laboratory, which has clients including Diageo and Google, has seen the sector explode in recent years. “Five years ago we drew up a list of competitors in the UK, which was four agencies. Now our competitive list here is over a hundred,” he says. Hardy estimates that the future gazing industry, comprising traditional trend forecasting companies, futures consulting businesses, and future-facing insight and intelligence, is now worth $100bn (£77bn) globally.

But it’s not just the allure of Silicon Valley and the parade of shiny new tech that is inspiring us to think ahead. The cultural impact of Richard Linklater’s film Boyhood, which took 12 years to make, is another factor, in Hardy’s view. “[Boyhood] has made a lot of people think about things they are starting now that they’ll only see the benefits of in the much longer term,” Hardy says.

Decades spent focused on short-term gains has led to a reassessment of priorities, he believes. “We’ve been doing a lot of things that make us feel good today but we know are going to make us unhealthier economically, socially or environmentally in years to come,” he says. “As a society we’ve focused on immediacy and returns right now, and in so doing we’ve lost the skill and ability to think for the long term.”

Keeping tabs on what is in store is clearly crucial for survival at a time when entire industries are being disrupted by new technologies and business models. “If you’re in the car industry and you’re making clutches, you’re going to be out of business. Everything will be software and electric vehicles,” Leonhard says. “If you haven’t seen that coming, you’re just dead.”

Futurists help businesses see their future direction, the opportunities and the risks open to them, as well as giving insight on upcoming trends. Leonhard says he simply focuses on the long term for people who are too busy do it for themselves. “If you took any executive and freed them up for two weeks and said look to the future they could probably find out what it is if they set their mind to it. Since they never get time, they use me as a translator.”

For business owners who don’t have the money to employ a futurist, Leonhard advises spending at least “5% to 10% of the time” thinking about the future and monitoring the latest advancements in the sector you operate in. “That’s essential because the time comes sooner than you think,” he says. “We all have the skill to see with a bit of foresight, it’s just that we don’t all embrace it like we could.”

When it comes to trends, the rise of intelligent machines is one that businesses of all sizes need to pay close attention to, Leonhard says. But small businesses that rely more on intuition than algorithms to anticipate the desires of their customers can also take heart. People are tiring of brands knowing what they want before they do.

“We’ve been on a course where we have thought what people want is to get things faster, easier and more efficiently. This has ruined the unexpectedness that used to be the hallmark of some businesses and businesses have become more digitally driven and less human,” Hardy says. He believes that in future business should put a focus on how it can inject more humanity, emotion and unexpectedness into the world.

But for all the forecasting there is no precise formula for success. Ultimately what the future holds is up to us. “It’s not like taking a pill; there’s no recipe for the future,” says Leonhard. “By examining the things that are around us we design the future.”

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