In the first episode of season two of the Back to the F**kture podcast, The Future Laboratory co-founder Martin Raymond discusses the adventures in the futures trade with Belgian forecaster Herman Konings
Given the current state of the world – from war in Ukraine to Covid to the ongoing climate crisis – we now need forecasters more than ever. Specifically, we need forecasters who take a more erudite, less linear, perhaps even a more poetic, look at all things related to the future.
Herman Konings is one such forecaster. He is author of seven books, studied theoretical psychology at the University of Leuven, and in his own words, ‘loves the theatrics of psychology and tomorrow as much as he does its theoretics’.
But he also loves forecasting’s complexity, as I discovered in my recent Back to the F**Kture podcast conversation with him. For him, forecasting is as much about drama, storytelling and the great potential and many possibilities of the human condition as it is about data, spreadsheets, and the forward extrapolation of bald facts and sometimes blind conjecture.
As he tells it, we can’t predict tomorrow, merely intuit, or imagine it. This was a lesson he learned from his own work, and from listening to the late great Watts Wacker, co-author of The 500 Year Delta, in which he suggests that we are moving from the age of reason to the age of possibility and imagination. And for Konings, as we hear, it is all about the latter, especially when dealing with the conundrum that is tomorrow and how we need to fabricate and design it.
‘Possibility and storytelling, when combined,’ he says, ‘are more truthful and accurate than any amount of data and analysis when it comes to envisaging the future, because data in many ways can exclude people and poetry, while good storytelling,’ as he learned from speaking with Wacker, ‘tells a great story, but a great storyteller tells you a story that helps you find yourself in that story.’
It is no surprise, then, that his books as well as his forecasts place people at the heart of their story as well as those fields like sociology, anthropology or psychology that attempt to explore, explain and decode them.
