Future projection is a form of mental time travel. You may already do it sub-consciously every day, although awareness of the process improves its application. Future projection is a ten second brain video of a specific future event. If you can, visualise it in full colour, and hear the sounds, and sense how you are feeling during the experience. Look at this through the eyes of the camera operator, and see yourself as though you are featured on a large screen. Play this brain video at normal life speed.

Here is one practice option for using this future projection. Think of an activity you are likely to do in the next few days for each of these four categories: exercise, nutrition, mental wellbeing, and relationships with loved ones. Perhaps you ended up with activities such as a 30-min jog late on Monday afternoon; vegetable stir-fry for dinner on Tues night; listening to meditative music for the last hour before Wednesday night bedtime; playing basketball with your son late on Thursday afternoon. Visualise a brain video of each activity. Practise this future projection process until it becomes part of your everyday thinking. Take note that energy follows intention.

Spotting the trends

Trend analysers carefully observe people in everyday life, and predict the probabilities for what will happen in the near future. Endless sites will provide these observations for you, and the topics can include fashion, transport, travel, beauty, business, and even weird gifts, such as sending your ex-partner a cactus. A trend is basically what is popular at a specific time in history. Google Trends helps you to research the trends of numerous issues. These may include what the inhabitants of a specific country are searching for right now, or even the collective list of people’s dreams all over the world.
Trendspotter sites are devoted solely to what might be coming soon. Try out trendwatching.com, meetglimpse.com or explodingtopics.com. Most have a free regular newsletter full of the latest data on their topic of interest. A search for Trend Analysis Tools Software will uncover many sites that provide you with the software that can help with your own analysis. Most require a subscription for the download.
Follow some futurists. They devote their lives to determining future possibilities and trends. Catherine Ball, Ross Dawson, Genevieve Bell, Gerd Leonhard, Soheil Inayatullah, Peter Diamandis, Tim Longhurst, Michael McQueen and Ray Kurzweil are just a few of the notable futurists worth following. A site called Compass, administered by the Association of Professional Futurists, provides rich and well-researched material on processes such as foresight and trend analysis.
Search for trends in your everyday life. Look in shop windows for designs that are pushing acceptable limits. Watch for the response in others when they see a specific event or display. Note the way that large crowds show interest in a street performer. Attend a trade show, and observe which stands attract the most people. Take photos of everything and anything (with respect to other people), and openly look for opportunities to capture the image in an unusual way. Engaging in photography encourages you to look around for new possibilities. Travel to new places can stimulate you into looking for different possibilities.

Scenario planning

Scenario planning is a strategy for mapping a range of future options. If you were thinking of starting a small business, you might place four headings along a line, namely: Worst, Passable, Good, Best. Under each heading, you would describe what that scenario would look like if you proceeded with this startup. If you work with a major corporation, they very likely invest significant time and money into developing worst to best case scenarios for their specific product or service.

Delphi Technique

The Delphi Technique taps into the collective thinking of a group of experts. Each person provides his or her answer to several rounds of questions, and the responses are shared anonymously with the team after each round. The questions might focus on future marketing options, or possible improvements resulting from the introduction of a new technology.

Question / Research / Predict / Analyse

Many predictive processes align with these four stages below. Here is an example of placing them into action.

1. Question: You clarify a key question or questions about what you want to predict. For example: To restock your online store, you might ask yourself: what specific items of clothing are most likely to be in future fashion? What ‘look’ will be in vogue in 8 months from today?
2. Research: You find as much contextual data as possible. You conduct a search on recent fashion shows and read everything that five of your favourite influencers have written in the past few weeks.
3. Predict: You make an interim prediction and assess the percentage probability of it taking place. The past year has featured a formal style, but your research indicates that ‘casual denim’ is about to come back in. You forecast an 80% chance of this becoming commonplace in 8 months from now.
4. Refine: You then spend several days on revisiting the prediction. Some further data indicates that the casual will be integrated with a sporty flair. You stay with your 80% prediction and add that a sporty look will be a key feature.

There are many variations on these processes, and you need to find what works for you. One extra worthwhile step is to analyse your success (or otherwise) after the predicted event has taken place. This would be your own version of hindcasting. Ask yourself: Q.1. What worked in this whole process? Q.2. What didn’t, and why? From there, build those learnings into the next predictive analysis that you do.

Rubberband Effect

Here is a time-honoured process for training your brain to cope with exponential change. With the Rubberband Effect, you stretch your thinking far beyond where it might normally venture. Once you have experienced this cognitive stretching, anything else you predict is going to feel more comfortable. For example, if you wanted to generate some innovative ideas for a possible side hustle business, you might begin by listing some highly improbable options.

These might include: Offering tourist tours of the Moon; helping your clients to become a World Leader for a day (take your pick of the country); providing food for the mass market that has been harvested within the past 24 hrs; replacing everyone’s clothes with invisible cloaks. As you can imagine, the list of improbable options would be endless.
Why engage in a process such as this? It stretches your thinking to then address other more realistic options. Those could include: tourism tours for star-gazing; selling masks of world leaders for people to play-act at being important; developing a business that sells locally grown fruit and vegetables (perhaps to the nearest 100 houses); designing camouflaged clothes that can blend in with different backgrounds.