How to Predict the Future and what to do about it so you Win!

As much as we say through business books and keynote speeches that we want to expect the unexpected, provide early warning, think outside of the box and create the future – we don’t. Not usually. Bureaucracies are designed to maintain their current structure, not to evolve to meet future challenges. Is this the result of fifty years of futurism, of thousands of executive retreats, of millions of pages of trend analysis? With decades of advanced intellectual techniques in foresight, why do we seem to keep stumbling into housing bubbles, financial collapse, disruptive technologies and wildcard events and then declare, “Nobody could see it coming!” In this world of superconnected economies and increasingly fragile institutions, we must restore our ability to imagine the future, based on critical thinking instead of fear. In How to Predict the Future…and WIN!!! Eric Garland illustrates how bureaucracies avoid actual discussions of their futures and recommends how we can turn our organizations around to become truly future-focused. His narrator in this intellectual journey is P. Hughes Egon, the world’s “premier futurological predictologist” for the past forty years who doesn’t realize how 1988 his visions of the future really are. In the book, Garland exposes Egon’s twenty-five “tips” on foresight so that our organizations can achieve actual vision of what’s next.