Skillsets for Futurists - what do you need in your toolbox to be effective?

Discourse Personal Development
1

As discussed here there are many types of futurists.

Would like to ask this forum what skills/techniques you have in your toolbox that you would like to share that you believe others should know:

Here are a few things that I find useful in the context of thinking about how to create a better future:

  1. Business Motivation Model - by the OMG. For me this is a great mental model of the key aspects you need to know to implement a vision.
  2. Lean
  3. Agile
  4. Object Modelling -
  5. Business Analysis techniques
  6. Balanced Scorecard
  7. Problem Solving skills (including lean & triz)
  8. Various psychology theories on such things as motivation, identity, etc
    …I have more but this will do for a start!

Would be interested to learn from others what skills/tools/techniques they find useful.

Ken

2

This looks like a pretty useful initiative! :slight_smile: I think it would make sense to distinguish between personal effectiveness and organizational effectiveness skills/techniques. Let me start start with some generic categories:

Personal effectiveness:

  1. Philosophy / purpose / vision / mission
  2. Ethical principles (mainly utilitarianism in my case) as basic guideline for what to do and what not to do
  3. Optimizing health:
  4. Healthy diet: Lots of veggies, and little sugar and refined carbs
  5. Exercise
  6. Meditation / mindfulness / stress reduction
  7. Getting enough sleep
  8. Supplementation
  9. Time and energy management (do activities which are most appropriate to your current energy level)
  10. Effective research and education techniques
  11. Self-leadership skills

Organizational effectiveness:

  1. Clear purpose / vision / mission
  2. Organizational principles (Lean, Agile, Teal, whatever)
  3. Optimizing effectiveness of the organization in accordance with techniques that are compatible to the organizational principles
  4. Communication skills
  5. Good understanding of human psychology
  6. Leadership skills

What seems extremely useful in both contexts is empirical self-evaluation to find out what really works and what doesn’t. This involves setting up metrics and measuring them, as well as tracking activities, events, and momentary states.