Future-Confident Leadership
- Graham
- Aug 29
- 7 min read
Updated: Sep 1
The world is on fire, and you're supposed to keep a cool head when making high-stakes decisions with long-term implications. No wonder leaders are hesitating to pull the trigger on big decisions – it's difficult to do your best work today when you're not sure tomorrow will come.
Amid the chaos, it's natural to to shy away from the challenges. Yet now is the time to lean in to the uncertainty by cultivating future confidence, a belief in our ability to not just navigate the change, but to take control of our destinies.
Scream if you want to go faster
But first, let's be kind to ourselves. Because our minds weren't designed for the world they have designed. Humans like a bit of uncertainty – we are natural explorers – yet too much can become overwhelming. If you think of a rollercoaster. Some people find the sudden acceleration too scary, but even for those who find it exciting, would we still like it if we had no idea how fast or twisty it could get?
We have what I describe as a psychological allergy to uncertainty, which paralyzes our ability think clearly about the future. An experiment conducted at the University College London showed that people found a 50:50 chance of being given a painful electric shock more stressful than a 100 percent chance. In other words, the certainty of the imminent pain is more comforting than the prospect you might be able to avoid it.
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The result is that during times of high uncertainty, the fear of messing up becomes a powerful motivator of inaction, which you'll see it in your workplace as procrastination, self-doubt and kicking the can down the road.
It doesn't have to be like this.
Uncertainty can't be resolved, but that doesn't matter. When you focus instead on maximizing your chances of success, you can start to exercise control over the future through your decisions. This is future confidence – an attitude of positivity toward the future.
Cultivating a mindset for success
As an organizational psychologist, I emphasize in my keynotes the importance of mindset in managing our natural responses to change and uncertainty.
Curiosity. To make decisions, we need opinions. But before we form those judgments, we should first exercise radical curiosity to properly understand what has happened, what is happening, and what could happen. One of our most debilitating habits, one borne from our ultra-short-termism, is making predictions. In the long-term, our predictions are almost always wrong, and history is littered with smart people saying very un-smart things about the future. Far more effective is to wonder why the world is as it is, and marvel at the possibilities that lay ahead.
Imagination. The future exists only in our imaginations. I can show you a picture of Detroit to entice you travel there with me, but I can't show you a picture of 2050. Imagination is a uniquely human competence, but one we squander. No other animal can conceive of several alternative futures, plan for one or more of them, and then collaborate on making them happen. The work of futurists, in fact, centers on getting people to use their imaginations to consider the future. A minority of us can do it, but for the rest of us, it remains a largely untapped resource that restricts our ability to fully access the future.
Spirit of experimentation. Society is completely hung up on the need to "be right," which is a major contributor to the fear of messing up. But you'll be much happier and less fearful if you regard life as one big experiment. Every decision you make is simply a chance to learn something, and undesirable outcomes usually teach us more than desirable ones.
Collaboration. The wisdom of the masses shows us that we can be remarkably accurate at guessing stuff when we do it as a group, even though individually we can be way off the mark. The same is true of the future, as demonstrated by the success of Superforecasters. The more views you get on the future, the fewer surprises it will hold.
Awareness. Awareness is probably the most wishy-washy of soft concepts, and yet it is also the hardest skill to master. It is really about where you place your attention and what you learn from it. You can place it on yourself, to learn how you respond to change, uncertainty and the future. You can place it on the past, future or present, or you can fritter it away by watching videos of cats doing the Macarena. The better you can control your awareness, the more confident you can be that you know what you're doing.
The techniques of futurists
Futurists have developed numerous tools to help people think more clearly about the future. Here I'll focus on a couple of techniques that deal with two of the biggest challenges to cultivating future confidence: Figuring out what will happen, and figuring out what we want.
A. Full-Spectrum Thinking
In my keynote talks on leadership, I often whip out a crystal ball because, well, people assume a futurist would have one. Whether you believe in them or not, the best a crystal ball can do is make predictions. You get light in one side, the crystal ball twists it all around, and you get a single image out the other side. We love predictions because they're simple to understand, we can easily find information to support them, and we can comfortably ignore confounding information until it's way too late.
Far superior to the crystal ball is the futures prism. Prisms take light and then split them into the component colors. Full-spectrum thinking means that instead of a single view, we get to see all the possibilities that make up "the future." Some might be more likely than others, and we're certainly going to like some more than others, but they're all there.
In practice, this means choosing a dimension of uncertainty and a timeframe, and then mapping out all the ways that uncertainty could pan out over that timeframe. For example, over the next 25 years, global temperatures could:
rise slowly
rise quickly
stay the same as now
fall (even if it's unlikely, why not think about it?)
rise then fall (interesting... what would that mean?)
Global temperature is a "thin" dimension of uncertainty, because there are a manageable number of resulting possibilities. A "fat" dimension of uncertainty would be something like climate change. The climate could change in any of a thousand ways over the next 20 years, and we can't possibly get our heads around all of them. Keep breaking down fat dimensions until you have one that's thin enough for you to analyze. And don't forget – the more dimensions you look at, the greater confidence you'll have in your understanding of the future.
B. Compelling Visions
Visionary leadership creates numerous benefits for an organisation. It has been shown to improve employee performance, organizational commitment, team dynamics and innovation. A McKinsey survey showed that transformations were 5.8 times more likely to succeed when there was a clear vision.
As a result, visionary is one of the highest accolades you can give to a business leader these days. But what exactly goes into making a great vision?
To be motivating, the vision needs to be:
different. It seems obvious, but when you ask people to imagine the future, they often come up with a picture that looks pretty much like today. For leadership to galvanize followership, the promised land must look substantially different from today.
appealing. Once again, this might seem obvious. Yet it's critical to remember that what's motivating for you might not be motivating for anyone else. Not only does the vision need to be communicated effectively so everyone is on the same page, but the leadership needs to check that everyone wants to be on that page.
detailed. We usually think of the future as only a vague sketch. To make it compelling, we need to colour it in so that it seems as vibrant as what we can see in front of us right now. That means not just making it look real, but employing all our senses to bring that future to life. The more vivid the vision, the more power it has in driving action.
emotionally resonant. People need to care about the vision for them to take action. If it doesn't have some kind of emotional hook – to a higher meaning – then it won't motivate.
A mental trip through time
You might think that futurists spend all day thinking about the future, but that's not quite right. The future exists only in our imaginations, and the fuel for our imaginations comes from our past experience. And there is no point thinking about the future unless it's going to guide our decision-making in the present. That's why as futurists we need to engage in what is known as mental time travel.
The first stop is the past. Despite the uncertainties, the future is really a continuation of the past, yet we squander much of the wisdom we could glean from our experiences. Our memories are unreliable and selective, meaning we overemphasize information that seems relevant to the ultra-short term, and ignore that which contributes to a healthy "long view." To really generate insight from the past, you need to be deliberate in reflecting on what has happened. A study of call centre trainees, for example, showed that those who spent just 15 minutes a day recalling and thinking about what they had learnt outperformed on the final exam by 23 percent.
The next stop is the future. Based on your understanding of the past, you are much better equipped to unlock the uncertainties and chart a course for success. This means engaging your imagination to engage in full-spectrum thinking and generating compelling, motivating visions of the future that your followers will find irresistible.
Finally, you return to the present, where you make the decisions that make a difference. Here you need to assess your state of mind, which research shows can have a massive impact on the decisions you make. This is also the time to embrace the spirit of experimentation, to ensure that you continue to learn from your decisions.
When the going gets tough
Leadership isn't judged during the good times, but rather when the going gets tough. By developing the right mindset, employing the right tools and engaging in mental time travel, leaders can build the confidence needed to make decisions with conviction.
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