How to Predict the Future, with Daniel Burrus

The New York Times described Daniel Burrus as one of the top three most in demand business gurus in the United States. He is generally considered one of the world’s leading experts in the area of global trends and future innovations. His tried and tested methodologies for increasing revenue through the embracing of technological innovations have led to him being much in demand by many Fortune 500 companies. His seven books have included the highly regarded Technotrends, The New York Timers and Wall Street Journal bestseller, Flash Foresight, and his latest bestseller, The Anticipatory Organization.

SPEAKING.COM: What can people do to accurately anticipate the future?

BURRUS: That is a key question because most people respond and react to change coming from the outside in, which is why agility has become such a big strategy for any kind of planning. Remember though, agility is a reactionary strategy. Agility by definition is reacting quickly after a disruption disrupts, or after a problem occurs, or a new opportunity presents itself. What I’ve been doing is teaching the other side of the strategy coin: the ability to anticipate.

You can learn to anticipate disruptions before they disrupt giving you a choice to be either disruptor or the disrupted. You can also learn to anticipate problems before you have them so that you can pre-solve them. I’ve developed this powerful Hard Trend Methodology over the last 35 years and its transformed how many of the world’s leading organizations, including the U.S. Department of Defense plans and innovates.

Let’s face it, there’s no shortage of trends; the real problem is which trends will happen and when. My methodology divides all trends into one of two types.

1. Hard Trends will happen. They’re based on future facts that cannot be changed. The advantage of knowing hard trends is that’s where you can see disruptions before they disrupt, problems before they happen, and opportunities before others can see them.

2. The other kind of trend is a Soft Trend. Soft Trends are not a future fact, they are an assumption about the future that might happen. The advantage of Soft Trends is if you don’t like them, you can change them.

When you start to learn to separate the hard trends from the soft trends, it really elevates your planning and transforms your results because at this point, you can find certainty in a seemingly uncertain world. It is commonly said that we can only be certain of death and taxes, but the reality is there are thousands of things that we can be certain of. We know that there’s 78 million baby-boomers in the U.S. who are going to get older; they’re not going to all of a sudden start getting young again. We know that we’re putting more and more in the cloud, and the cloud is not getting full. We know after 5G wireless, we’ll actually get 6G, followed by 7G, and so on.

These are simple examples, but they do illustrate that there are many things you can be certain about, and when you have certainty in an uncertain world, you have the confidence to make bold moves. Another important element is that using this method, you can predict problems and either let them play out, or you can pre-solve those problems and not have them in the first place.

SPEAKING.COM: How do you separate hard trends from soft trends?

BURRUS: As I mentioned, hard trends are based on a future fact that will happen and there are three categories of hard trends. The first category is demographics. As I said earlier, there are 78 million baby-boomers in the U.S. that will indeed get older and we can see a lot of amazing opportunities from that. For example, many people love to go boating or fishing, but as they get older, it gets kind of hard to launch the boat. If you decided to base your innovation around that hard trend and related opportunity, you might create the easy launch trailer for seniors. If you’re good at designing that easy launch trailer for seniors, you would end up doing quite well because there are 10,000 people retiring a day. Basically, you would have a built-in growing market that is fully predictable. You would even know which countries to export it to and which ones not to export it to.

The second of the three categories is government regulation, which contrary to popular belief, is amazingly predictable. For example, will we have more regulations around cyber security? The answer is, yes. Even though our current administration doesn’t like regulation and we’re in an era of deregulation, there are some hard trends at play we can’t ignore. So instead of looking at all the things I don’t know, all the regulations that may or may not happen – the soft trends – I like to look at all the things I do know – all the certainties that I can see. You could get quite a list of regulations that we will indeed happen and some new opportunities to take advantage of them.

The third category of hard trend is technology, which lets us redefine reality and do things that were impossible just a few years ago. Ever since my first list of 20 Core Technologies that would drive economic value creation for decades to come was first published in 1983 – which by the way, did include the Internet, digital technology and AI – my annual Hard Trend Technology List has proven to be quite a blueprint for organizations worldwide. You can find that list on burrus.com.

When separating Hard Trends from Soft Trends, ask yourself: “Can it be changed?” For example, the rising cost of health care in the United States has been going on for a long time and many people think that there’s no end in sight. Does that mean it’s a hard trend that is impossible to stop, or is it a soft trend you could change? In reality, it’s a soft trend, because we could use technologies, like Blockchain, to bring transparency, trust and more security to a healthcare system that has no transparency and little trust right now. Furthermore, we could lower costs by multiples of millions and even billions. You could do the same with virtualization and transform purchasing and logistics within all hospital systems and lower costs by not just millions, but billions. This is a topic I explore in much greater depth in my latest book, The Anticipatory Organization.

SPEAKING.COM: Could you give us an example of a specific hard trend you believe will go mainstream this year or next year and explain why you identified it as a hard trend?

BURRUS: Back in 1990, I first started talking about the future of intelligent electronic agents. Today, we call them, chatbots, like Amazon’s Alexa. I’ve been talking about chatbots and giving accurate predictions about them for many decades. What we’re going to see coming out next year is Alexa and other electronic chatbots being embedded in everyday devices, creating a new computer interface – your voice – you talk to and get answers from it. For example, I’ve worked with a client of mine inputting an Alexa-like voice interface in thermostats for commercial operations. Many of us have been in a meeting room where the temperature gets either too hot or too cold, and we have to find someone from the hotel or the Convention Center to change it. But if you have my consulting client’s system, all you have to do is say the keyword and “lower the temperature by two degrees” and it will do it.

That’s just a quick example, but overall, everything from thermostats to everyday devices are now becoming voice-enabled, all connected to the cloud and the supercomputer in the cloud, so expect voice interface to be one of your new ways of interfacing with devices of all types.

SPEAKING.COM: What mistakes do people tend to make when strategizing for the future?

BURRUS: People assume that because everything is changing so quickly and technology is accelerating at an exponential rate, there’s no point in planning because there’s nothing that you can count on. Of course, that would be a major mistake because there are thousands of things that are hard trends that will indeed happen. I know that because I’ve been sharing this methodology around the world for quite a while, and my clients have identified literally thousands of hard trend certainties they know will happen.

When you learn how to find certainty through hard trends, and how to separate the hard trends from the soft trends, you can identify amazing new opportunities to innovate with low risk.

SPEAKING.COM: Why do you believe we all have a natural sense of foresight?

BURRUS: How many times have you said, “I knew that was going to happen.”? That was part of your foresight.

What we don’t have as humans, though, is knowing whether we should trust it or not. Tons of people didn’t buy Facebook stock, Google stock or Apple stock even though they might have said to themselves, “I know that’s going to be good.”

That’s why my hard trend/soft trend methodology can really help you separate the wheat from the chaff so that you know what to trust and what not to trust.

SPEAKING.COM: How can people learn to exercise and trust their sense of foresight?

BURRUS: Strategy based on certainty has low risk while strategy based on uncertainty has high risk. Certainty gives you the confidence to make a bold move. It allows you to write a big check. It gives you the power to move forward instead of being hesitant.

And certainty, of course, can be determined through identifying those hard trends that we know will happen. I call those future facts and when you have a big list of future facts in front of you, all of a sudden you have the confidence to make a bold move.

One other important thing is that a trend by itself is not really powerful until you attach it to an opportunity. When you identify a hard trend that will happen and a related opportunity, it bursts into life. When you identify a soft trend that might happen and how you might influence it to your advantage, all of a sudden, it turns into an advantage for you. So always attach an opportunity to either a hard trend or soft trend and you can learn to use that foresight to your advantage.

SPEAKING.COM: What is the Anticipatory Organization Model and how can businesses apply it to accelerate their growth and success?

BURRUS: My latest book, The Anticipatory Organization focuses on this in-depth. The Anticipatory Organization Model is based on a learning system that I developed a number of years ago for leadership teams and their organizations. It’s an electronic learning system that has teaming elements that is being used by a wide range of organizations worldwide, including Fortune 500, midsize organizations, and government including the Pentagon, and I’m happy to report it produces amazing results fast. I think that’s why it received a product of the year award shortly after launch.

There are four elements to it. The first one is around transforming planning which involves separating the hard trends from the soft trends, and their related opportunities.

The second part is transforming innovation – using the eight hard trend innovation accelerators that I define in the book and in the model, along with how to combine them with some other innovation tools that can give you a major advantage. That includes how to empower everyone in the organization to innovate on an everyday basis and how to do exponential innovation, using exponential technology to take a transformational leap ahead with low risk.

The third part of the model is how to Transform Culture to increasing relevancy based on the direction the future is going. Your culture is your key competitive advantage. Any product or service can be copied, but your culture cannot be. As the pace of change continues to accelerate exponentially, simply having a good agile culture that reacts quickly becomes less valuable every year, so what I’m doing is showing you how to create an anticipatory culture, turning transformational change and exponential technologies into an advantage, and how to become a positive disruptor instead of always just being the disrupted.

The last part of the module is transforming results. This is where you learn how to Skip Your Biggest Problems, which is actually quite possible. Also I give them tools to accelerate success, to take things that might have taken two or three years and actually learn how to do them in two or three months, or two or three weeks.

SPEAKING.COM: Why do you believe companies should skip their biggest problems?

BURRUS: There are two elements to Problem Skipping. One is realizing that whatever problem you think you have is not the real problem, and that’s why you can’t solve it. I’ve never found a problem you couldn’t solve once you realize what the problem really is. I teach how to peel back the onion and identify the real problem allows you to move forward in a new and powerful way.

The second element to skipping the problem is learning how to truly skip it altogether.

I was working with a hotel chain that had just built a number of new hotels and they were getting complaints because the elevators were slow. Putting in fast elevators would be almost impossible due to the costs, but that wasn’t the real problem; the real problem was that the people waiting for elevators were bored.

So they skipped the problem of replacing the elevators and instead, put full-length mirrors right by the entrance to every elevator on every floor, and people weren’t bored anymore. They started looking at their appearance, adjusted their tie, adjusted their dress, and all of a sudden, the elevator was there and all the complaints went away.

SPEAKING.COM: You started out your career teaching biology and physics. How did you go from teaching science to becoming a futurist and how has your scientific background affected your current work?

BURRUS: I loved teaching, I even got “Educator of the Year” my first year of teaching. At the same time, I was always entrepreneurial and one summer I build an experimental aircraft, test flew it, and it turned out to be a very innovative and great plane. I ended up selling the plane with 37 national locations in that first year. Within two years, I started another company, and another and another, with all of them profitable in the first year.

I was really good at business, but I missed teaching. So I asked myself, “When I’m in my late 90s looking back at my life and seeing how I made all my money by doing all these businesses, will I be happy?” The answer was “no”. I realized that I was put on the planet to teach. So I sold the businesses, started Burrus Research 35 years ago, and went forward rather than back to teaching in a new way.

I started out by spending a year researching global innovations in all areas of technology and science. I came up with what was called “the 20 Core Technologies that would drive economic value creation and shape the future for decades to come.” It was a Taxonomy of High Technology (which by the way, is still totally valid all these decades later).

After giving my first speech about it, there was a line of executives who wanted me to speak to their company and thankfully there has been a line ever since. As a matter of fact, at this point in my career, I’ve given a little over 3,000 keynote speeches all around the world to audiences as large as 14,000 and as small as 10 or 15.

SPEAKING.COM: How has being a futurist changed over the last 35 years in your work?

BURRUS: When I started 35 years ago, there were only a handful of futurists. As far as I can tell, I was one of the first that focused on the future impact of technology.

Now, it seems like everybody wants to be a futurist. The problem is, anyone can be a futurist because all you have to do is make a prediction and you’re now a futurist. To be a professional futurist, though, you actually have to have a track record of being right; the longer your track record of being right is, the more valuable you are as a futurist. Because I’m combining my history of accurate trend forecasts with my Hard Trend methodology and strategies for exponential innovation, the global demand has never been higher.

In addition to speaking and consulting, I have a number of publications like our Know What’s Next Magazine and our Technotrends Newsletter. I also write an article a week, and that’s how I’ve gained 1.3 million followers on LinkedIn plus a couple of million monthly blog readers.

To bring futurist and technology speaker, Daniel Burrus to your organization, please contact Michael Frick at: Mike@Speaking.com