Freedom in foresight – the reason why children make the best futurists!

I am in the business of futuring, and I am glad that in my part of the world, it is catching on and with a lot of excitement. One of the greatest difficulties I have encountered as I facilitate these processes is what it entails for people or organizations to fully utilize the available intelligence - especially the non-mainstream, seemingly obscure gut feeling or ostensibly disparate information – to effectively increase insights. 

The inability to do so is orchestrated by the fact that all human beings have a particular worldview they use to filter things, including information. The tendency is to reject whatever is not congruent with those filters. These relatively narrow mental constructs are based on past and the conventional lenses they use to view the world. However, one other crucial reason is that they come to these processes with self-serving biases that incline them to gather and process information to advance their perceived self-interest or support their pre-existing views. To be politically correct, they seldom voice all their standpoints, cynicisms, fears, or assumptions, without which the process short-circuits the creation of robust futures that enable strategic decision making.

To guard against these blind spots, it is imperative to consider:

1. Joining these processes from a place of complete honesty, awareness, reflection, and the openness to learn just like children view the world with wide-open eyes and a sense of wonder and curiosity
2. More honest analyses of the data we collect, including the emerging weak signals we often dismiss to re-conceptualize our ideas and get multiple views, just like children are open to having more than 'the right answer' to a question 
3. The effective use of human intelligence tacked away in gut feelings just like children bluntly say what they think, however illogical
4. Inviting those people we rarely interact with, the ones who are not like us – the authentic dissenters or devils advocates - with the intention to value those outside views just like children are un-inhibited and open to playing with everyone
5. Highly abstracting sensitive situations and role-playing them to literary 'put oneself in another's shoes' and increasing empathy while creating a much more open interaction, just as children often experiment with anything in their context to imagine different fantasies, aka possibilities!