GUEST POST from Robert B. Tucker

With war in Iran disrupting the global energy supply, AI breakthroughs threatening jobs, and political, demographic, and social forces colliding everywhere, we may be entering an age where disruption is the permanent new normal.

The question is what to do about it.

In this new age of constant acceleration, traditional approaches to planning are out the window. Leaders who rely on methods that worked in the past may find themselves reacting to events, forever firefighting, and playing catch-up. In an age defined by compounding disruptions, leaders cannot rely solely on incremental planning, quarterly metrics, or yesterday’s assumptions.

What this moment demands is a different discipline altogether: the ability to think like futurists and visionaries and reinvent how we navigate the future.

That was the central message delivered recently by leading futurist Rachel Hatch of the Institute for the Future, at the 2026 REACH Ideas and Action Summit in California’s Central Coast region. “The future is far too complex and uncertain and combinatorial to predict,” Hatch told the gathering of industry, government, and nonprofit leaders at the UC Santa Barbara campus.

“If someone’s pretending that they can predict the future, they probably shouldn’t be trusted. But what we can do is to help people think more systematically and creatively about how the future might be different. And adopt certain foresight tools to guide us forward.”

The Institute was founded in 1968 to study long-term societal and technological change. The Palo Alto, California, nonprofit conducts foresight research that helps businesses, governments, and nonprofits to map scenarios and better prepare for change.

Hatch and her fellow researchers collaborate with organizations as varied as the Episcopal Church, public transit agencies, universities, nonprofits, and economic development consortia such as REACH, which organized the one-day conference on the UCSB campus.

In times like these, noted Hatch, leaders must do two things at once: improvisation and imagination. “Most of you are already improvising all day long, responding to surprises, disruptions, funding shifts, political whiplash, labor shortages, new technologies, and changing expectations. But tapping your imagination, and opening the mental space to think deeply and systematically about what might come next, is often crowded out by urgency.”

To Hatch, this reactive leadership style is a mistake. In such environments, preparedness becomes a core leadership discipline. “Preparedness does not mean predicting the future with precision. It means developing the habits, mindsets, and frameworks that allow us to respond wisely to multiple plausible futures before they arrive at full force.”

Hatch made this point memorably by recalling an exercise the Institute conducted in 2008, led by IFTF colleague Jane McGonigal. Using a game called Superstruct, one of the scenarios the group explored was the possibility of an out-of-control global respiratory pandemic. Participants were invited to imagine a scenario where a virus went rogue and ponder, “If this were to happen, what would you do? How would you respond?”

One participant in the 2008 exercise mentioned digging old paint masks out of the garage. Another imagined supply chains breaking down. A third wondered how parents would work while simultaneously schooling their children at home. The value of the exercise, Hatch noted, was not that people would someday declare themselves “fully prepared to face a pandemic,” but that they developed what she called “a little bit more of a readiness posture” by allowing themselves to imagine a future they would rather not contemplate.

That phrase—readiness posture—is exactly right for today’s mass uncertainty and acceleration. And it encapsulates the value of futurist thinking. We cannot know with pinpoint accuracy which event will happen on which date. After all, the future is, as Hatch put it, “far too complex and uncertain and combinatorial” for that.

But we can think more systematically and creatively about how the future might be different, and we can use that thinking to make better choices now. Which is where the futurist tool of strategic foresight comes in.

Hatch defined foresight as “a set of tools, processes, and mindsets for developing strategy and making decisions under conditions of uncertainty.” Techniques can be taught. Tools can be adopted. Yet the hardest part is shifting our thinking and letting in different points of view. “Helping leaders loosen their grip on the ‘official future’ that they have been assuming will happen— takes humility, curiosity, and courage. And often a new mindset.”

Hatch identified several cognitive traps that make future-focused thinking difficult. One is the bias toward precision metrics: the belief that the more data we gather, the more certainty we possess. Data matters, of course. But when leaders become intoxicated by dashboards and forecasts, they often mistake numerical precision for strategic insight. The result is overconfidence, followed by disruption.

Another trap is what she calls “official futures.” Every organization has one: a default set of assumptions about what the market will do, how customers will behave, how technology will unfold, or what success will look like three years from now. These assumptions can create alignment, but they can also become blinders. As Hatch reminded her audience, Nokia once looked unassailable. The official future said so—right until it didn’t.

Then there is the deeply human issue of anxiety about change. Fear narrows imagination. Stress locks us into defensive postures. When people feel under threat, they want to protect the budget, the institution, the business model, the identity, the orthodoxy. But that instinct, however understandable, can make it harder to see emerging possibilities. In my language, this is why adaptability and anticipatory thinking must be cultivated before disruption peaks, not afterward.

Perhaps Hatch’s most fascinating insight came from neuroscience. Research suggests that when people think about their future selves, the brain often responds much as it does when thinking about a stranger. In other words, the future self can feel abstract, distant, and only weakly connected to the present self. That helps explain why leaders, institutions, and even regions so often underinvest in long-term resilience. The future feels real intellectually, but not viscerally.

So how do leaders overcome these traps? Hatch’s answer is both practical and powerful: collect signals of change. These are “vivid, surprising, specific observations about how the world is changing today.” They are not vague trend statements. They are concrete clues—new behaviors, strange business models, emerging technologies, shifting values—that reveal how the future is already arriving in uneven ways.

Futurist and science fiction writer William Gibson famously said, “The future is already here. It’s just not evenly distributed.” Hatch rightly brought that line into her lecture, and it speaks to one of the most under-appreciated disciplines in leadership: learning to spot the future early, while it is still scattered, local, and easy to dismiss.

Hatch’s examples were appropriately provocative. One involved a startup called Rent-a-Human, where AI agents deploy humans into the physical world to perform tasks they themselves cannot do. Another focused on the growing scale of prediction markets and what Hatch called the possible “gamblification economy,” in which younger generations (disillusioned about conventional paths to prosperity) turn increasingly to betting, speculation, and crypto as alternative financial strategies. These examples may sound fringe, even absurd. But as the pioneer of modern futures thinking Jim Dator observed, any useful statement about the future should sound ridiculous at first.

As a fellow futurist, what I especially appreciated was Hatch’s insistence that foresight must lead to action. “Foresight should never be about bright, shiny futures,” she said. “It’s not about naval gazing.” The point is not to marvel at novelty. The point is to make better decisions, allocate resources more wisely, and build stronger institutions while there is still time to do so.

When the pace of change was slower, leaders could get by with experience, instinct, and incremental adjustment. That era is over. In the Age of Acceleration, the advantage will go to those who can widen the time horizon, detect signals early, challenge the official future, and build what Rachel Hatch aptly calls a readiness posture.

Thinking like a futurist is no longer a niche exercise for specialists; it is becoming the defining leadership competency of our time.

This article originally appeared in Forbes

Image credit: Pexels

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