The Future Laboratory’s co-founder and LS:N Global’s editor in chief Martin Raymond discusses all things normal (but not so everyday – yet!) with Future Normal authors Henry Coutinho Mason and Rohit Bhargava in our latest Back to the F**kture podcast episode.
Reluctant futurists is the collective descriptor used by Henry Coutinho Mason and Rohit Bhargava to describe their current career trajectory in my latest Back to the F**kture podcast. Their preferred term, they tell me, is near futurists since their work is invariably about a quest to catalogue and understand the implications of the biggest innovations on our lives today and over the coming years.
The ‘today’ bit is important, since the focus of their singular and collective thinking is not about looking at what could change the future – a very standard thing for futurists, they tell me – ‘but to look at what already has’ and then they ask themselves the question, in turn, ‘Do we want this change to be part of humanity’s future?’
To forecast, then, they look at the present: what’s happening now, who is doing it, where it’s happening and which are the innovator businesses adopting or driving it. As Henry puts it, ‘Any new business innovation, or start-up or initiative from an existing brand, is a bet on the future.’
‘Taken in isolation,’ adds Rohit ‘each of these bets is a signal that a group of people believes their view of the future will be successful. When similar wagers are being made by multiple businesses in a diverse range of markets and categories, we can extract insights about where the future of ‘normal’ is going.’
Normal, however, is not a term you’d readily associate with the future. The future, after all, ‘is a bold vision; world-changing technology; global science’. But for them, as authors of the bestselling Non-Obvious Trends (Rohit) and Trend-Driven Innovation (Henry), normal, or variations on the theme, is a word that they found they had in common, especially when it came to sitting in driverless cars (normal), wearing Google Glass (abnormal), chatting to uncanny holograms (very abnormal) and using AI to write their articles (they didn’t tell me the answer to that one).
But normal, as they see it, isn’t about the ordinary or the mundane. It is really about our needs for identity, connection, self-improvement, status and more, and how these are bolstered and have evolved or deepened as a result of our involvement with technology and innovation; ‘the bets’, in other words, that business is already making, and innovators and entrepreneurs are constantly bringing to the fore.
