Narrator: Imagine standing in a fast-fashion store, surrounded by the chaos of a holiday sale. You glance at the T-shirts and see a strange conversation happening in slogans. One shirt declares, "The Future is Female." Another, on a sweatshirt, says, "Undo The Future." A trucker hat simply reads, "Alternative Futures." As you leave, someone walks by with a shopping bag that insists, "THE FUTURE DOESN'T WAIT." This isn't a scene from a science fiction novel; it's a real observation made by author Scott Smith. It reveals a profound truth about our modern world: "The Future" has been turned into a brand, a commodity sold to us in bite-sized, often contradictory, pieces. We're constantly told to prepare for a future that is presented as either a gleaming utopia or a grim dystopia, with very little room in between. The book, How to Future: Leading and sense-making in an age of hyperchange, by Scott Smith with Madeline Ashby, serves as a practical guide to cut through this noise. It argues that the future isn't a fixed destination to be passively awaited, but a landscape of possibilities that we can, and must, actively explore and shape.

Narrator: The book begins by asserting that the concept of "The Future" has become a dominant cultural force, heavily marketed and often oversimplified. It's not just in H&M slogans; it's plastered across airport advertisements where software companies and financial institutions promise to transport you to "Future Ground Zero." This constant marketing, which the authors call "futurewash," frames the future as a singular, inevitable path that is already designed. All we have to do is buy the right product or service to get on board.

This commercialization creates a false dichotomy. Public discourse often presents the future as a binary choice between a perfect utopia and a complete dystopia. This simplification serves political and commercial agendas but robs us of the ability to have nuanced, productive conversations about the complex realities we face. As co-author Madeline Ashby notes, "Your utopia is always somebody else’s dystopia." By recognizing that the future is being sold to us in these pre-packaged forms, we can begin to break free from their limitations and start asking more critical questions about what kinds of futures are truly possible, and for whom.

Narrator: A core principle of the book is a fundamental shift in thinking, captured in the phrase: "The future is a verb, not a noun." It’s not a static endpoint we arrive at, but an active, ongoing process of exploration and adaptation. To truly engage in this process, we must challenge what the authors call "official futures"—the dominant narratives and assumptions that can stifle innovation.

A powerful example of an official future is Moore's Law. In 1965, Gordon Moore observed that the number of transistors on a circuit would double roughly every two years. This observation became a self-fulfilling prophecy for the semiconductor industry. Giants like Intel and IBM built their entire strategies, investments, and R&D cycles around this assumption. For decades, it provided a clear and certain roadmap. However, when the physical limits of silicon began to slow this pace, the industry, which had been so focused on this one "official future," was forced to scramble for alternative pathways. This story illustrates how clinging to a single, accepted vision of the future can prevent organizations from seeing and preparing for change until it's almost too late. Futuring, as an active verb, is about constantly questioning these official narratives and exploring the alternatives they obscure.

Narrator: If the future isn't a pre-written script, how do we begin to understand it? The authors argue that it starts with "sensing" and "scanning"—the practice of finding signals of the future in the present. This is not about passively tracking what’s already trending. As writer Rob Walker is quoted, "If all you do is track what’s trending, then all you’ll ever know is exactly what everyone else already knew. To discover, you have to dig."

This "digging" requires cultivating a specific mindset, but it also comes with a modern peril: information overload. The book uses a powerful metaphor from Warren Ellis’s novella Normal, which is set in a rehab center for futurists suffering from "abyss-gaze," the mental strain of processing too much information. The warning is clear: "Gaze into the abyss all day and the abyss will gaze into you." Constantly consuming news and data doesn't automatically lead to better foresight; it can lead to stress, anxiety, and an inability to distinguish signal from noise. The authors argue for a more strategic approach, one that is less about drinking from the firehose and more like a sommelier tasting wine—selecting new "flavors" of information to get a sense of the landscape without becoming overwhelmed.

Narrator: Once signals have been collected, the crucial next step is sense-making: turning a chaotic inventory of data and insights into meaningful patterns and themes. This is where the process shifts from collecting to understanding. The authors introduce the STEEP framework—a tool for categorizing trends across Social, Technological, Economic, Environmental, and Political domains—to ensure a holistic view.

The power of this approach is illustrated in a story about a global pharmaceutical brand exploring the future of wellbeing in 2016. Their focus was narrow, centered on digestive health. The research team, however, identified an outlier trend: the growing legalization of marijuana. Initially, this seemed irrelevant to the client. But the researchers framed it as a major cultural shift that could redefine consumer perceptions of wellbeing and disrupt spending habits. By presenting this "outlier" as part of a larger map of change, they stretched the client's frame of reference. By 2019, cannabis-based wellness products had become a significant issue in the consumer pharma market, proving the value of looking beyond the obvious and mapping the connections between seemingly unrelated trends.

Narrator: Abstract trends and maps can be difficult for people to grasp. The next phase of futuring is to bring them to life through storytelling and prototyping. Scenarios are not predictions; they are strategic stories that explore how a future might plausibly unfold. They weave together different trends and drivers to create a rich, immersive context.

To make these scenarios even more powerful, the authors advocate for creating "artefacts from the future." These are tangible objects that make a future feel real and allow people to engage with it directly. A brilliant example comes from the Near Future Laboratory, which was tasked with exploring the cultural impact of big data. To make this complex topic accessible to the public in Manchester and Barcelona, they didn't write a report. Instead, they created a sports tabloid from four years in the future. The format was instantly familiar, but the content—stories about algorithm-driven team selections and data-based refereeing—provoked questions about a world saturated with data. The newspaper acted as an entry point, allowing people to hold a piece of a possible future in their hands and grapple with its implications in a way a presentation never could.

Narrator: The ultimate goal of futuring is not just to generate interesting ideas, but to build an organization's capacity to act on them. The final step is to assess an organization's readiness for the futures that have been explored. The book provides a framework for this, asking organizations to conduct a gap analysis across five key layers: People (skills and mindsets), Knowledge (information and insights), Tools (technologies and platforms), Rules (policies and governance), and Networks (partners and relationships).

This involves asking, for each potential scenario, "What do we have now?" versus "What will we need?" This structured assessment moves the conversation from abstract speculation to concrete strategic planning. It helps identify vulnerabilities and opportunities, allowing an organization to determine which future trajectories are most viable and what investments are needed to prepare. By making this assessment an ongoing practice, futuring evolves from a one-off project into a deeply embedded organizational culture—one that is agile, forward-looking, and prepared to navigate the complexities of hyperchange.

Narrator: The single most important takeaway from How to Future is that agency over the future is not a given; it must be cultivated. The book provides a powerful antidote to the passive consumption of pre-packaged futures by offering a structured, practical toolkit for exploration and action. It demystifies the process of thinking about what's next, transforming it from an act of abstract prediction into a hands-on practice of sensing, mapping, and building. The book's ultimate challenge is for us to stop waiting for the future and start making it. It leaves readers with a critical question: What is the one "official future" in your industry or your life that you accept without question, and what new possibilities might emerge if you started to dig for the alternatives?