It would be fun to see into the future—or at least interesting. While no one has a crystal ball, you might not need one. A better strategy may be to create your future, which requires the skill of prospection, says Gabriella Rosen Kellerman, author of Tomorrowmind: Thriving at Work with Resilience, Creativity, and Connection—Now and in an Uncertain Future and chief innovation officer for the coaching and care platform BetterUp.
“Prospection is the ability to imagine and plan for the future,” she says. “In an era of rapid change and uncertainty, the better poised we can be to respond to the changes as they come, the more sense of empowerment and agency we will have.”
To get better at prospection, Rosen Kellerman says you have to understand its two phases:
Phase one
The first phase is fast, optimistic, and divergent. “It’s everything that comes up when you first think about something that could happen in the future, such as planning the next phase in your career,” says Rosen Kellerman. “There’s excitement as ideas come to you. And some people get nervous during this phase.”
People who struggle with this phase often stay here longer than they need to be, focusing on the negative, says Rosen Kellerman. “We think it’s protective to think more pessimistically,” she says. “If I think about the worst-case scenario, I might be better prepared for it. But actually, optimism is much better for your health. Studies show that optimism extends your lifespan. Simply allowing yourself to be optimistic can be part of the work of getting better at phase one.”
For some people, the hardest part of phase one is overcoming the resistance of optimism. For others, it’s stretching the limits of their map, casting a broader and vaster picture. It helps to expand your default mode network, which is the brain network you use when you’re in daydreaming mode. This is essential for creativity, and it includes the raw material for divergent thinking tasks.
To create a wider future, Rosen Kellerman recommends feeding it more information by seeking novelty. For example, switch up a routine, taking a new route to work. You could also gently explore things that interest you. For example, reading a novel about someone who’s in that line of work can broaden the realm of the possible and enrich the default mode network.
“Challenge yourself to think bigger than you would have otherwise,” says Rosen Kellerman. “Stay in this phase, embracing the optimism and thinking as divergently as possible.”
Phase two
Regardless of the emotions you have, all of us quickly shift into a second phase. Our brains naturally trigger us to get there all the time. While it’s important to spend enough time in phase one, phase two is when you’re more deliberative, evaluative, and realistic, says Rosen Kellerman.
“This phase informs the actions you’ll take,” she says. “It’s where we’re down to brass tacks with what’s actually possible and what it might take to get there.”
There are some cognitive biases that make it harder for us to realistically plan for the future. One of them was described as the “planning fallacy,” a cognitive model identified by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky in 1979.
“It basically says that if you are trying to plan for something in your own theater with personal obligations, you have the tendency to underestimate the amount of time and cost it’s going to take,” says Rosen Kellerman. “If you’ve ever done a home renovation, you tend to think it’s going to go faster and be cheaper than it [ends up being]. That’s a classic example of the planning fallacy.”
Bringing the phases to life
To set yourself up for success, Rosen Kellerman recommends using a framework called “WOOP,” which was created by Gabriele Oettingen, a professor of psychology at New York University and the University of Hamburg. WOOP stands for “wish, outcome, obstacle, plan.”
The first step is to identify the wish; what you hope will come to pass. Rosen Kellerman says this is phase-one work. The second step is to identify the outcome you want if your wish comes true.
“What are the specific pieces of that outcome that you can most vividly imagine?” asks Rosen Kellerman. “That helps you get beyond the higher level emotional, intuitive feel for what that outcome could be to a much more concrete fleshed out idea of what you’re trying to accomplish.”
The third step is considering the obstacles, minimizing their potential. This is where you address the planning fallacy. “Call out as many obstacles as possible,” says Rosen Kellerman. “Think about external things, as well as things that could be internal, like existing habits of ours that could get in the way.”
The last step is to plan what to do when one of the obstacles happens, using “when then” statements.
“This helps us prevent wasting time if or when those things occur because we already have the plans in place,” says Rosen Kellerman. “It helps us keep from shutting ourselves down emotionally for something we think is unrealistic, because we know we’ve done the work to think about what it would take to overcome it.”
Prospection isn’t about predicting the future; it’s about positioning yourself to go after the things you want and positioning yourself to a wide range of potential outcomes, says Rosen Kellerman.
“Part of the work is making sure it’s divergent enough with a set of potential outcomes,” she says. “Then the planning is getting more focused about what we want to accomplish and going after it.”
Recognize your brand’s excellence by applying to this year’s Brands That Matter Awards before the early-rate deadline, May 3.
