Nick Foster doesn’t call himself a futurist.
Yes, he has worked to envision the future at Nokia, Sony, Dyson and Apple. And as the head of design at Google X — the “moonshot factory” that helped conceive Alphabet’s self-driving car and smart glasses.
But he wants to distance himself from that job title’s connotation: “It feels like there’s a tendency to pigeonhole people who do this work,” as if their purpose were to “communicate an ambition or some marketing video,” he said.
In his view, spelled out in his upcoming book, “Could Should Might Don’t,” mapping a path amid uncertainty and rapid technological development calls for a more rigorous approach. Foster talked with DealBook about what that looks like.
What’s wrong with the way that companies typically handle the future?
It just feels like an underdeveloped skill in almost everybody I’ve ever worked with.
You can be sitting in a meeting with people with Ph.D.s or people who have led billion-dollar companies. And when they’re talking about the here and now, it’s very empirical and detail oriented. There has to be a well-reasoned answer for every question or opinion.
When you start to talk about the future, people just grab “The Matrix” or “The Jetsons” or flying cars, which to me points at a lack of learning and rigor and ability in that domain.
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