I’m sure by now, most marketing leaders have heard the saying “don’t get out over your skis” when preparing for the future. Looking at the future sometimes gets a bad rap, but we can’t lose sight of why it can be an extremely valuable exercise.

Futurism, which is simply the art of preparing for the future, helps marketing leaders manage uncertainty by evaluating disruptions, critical uncertainties, emerging trends and unconventional viewpoints. Organizations have to walk the line between dueling perspectives: Looking at the future is either a worthwhile, innovative activity, or it’s perceived as a foolish exercise. Marketers need to take on the role as a fulcrum in that balancing act and embrace experimentation, or microsteps, to show the value of innovation.

Future-fit organizations are ready for the future: they respond to it, drive it and thrive in it.

After all, it’s not enough to just be resilient. Gartner research indicates that organizations get ahead by embracing anti-fragility — or a state where an enterprise is poised to improve the more uncertainty and disruption there is — by introducing uncertainty into their organizations. In our 2022 Corporate Growth Strategies Survey, we found out that high-growth organizations, those that anticipate over 10% revenue growth in the fiscal year, actually use some of these anti-fragile tactics at a higher rate than organizations which expect less than 10% growth.

Not so long ago, a disruption meant the sudden emergence of a business rival that upended an industry, usually through digital innovation. Those jolts were scary enough, but lately external shocks have hit even harder, altering many sectors at once. They’ve hit bigger, surging across the whole world.

CMOs and other business leaders tell us they’ve been unprepared for the knock-on effects of overlapping crises. Anticipating the next political shifts, social upheaval, superstorm, inflation or invasion — and their combined cumulative effect — has been impossible. Executives say they’ve been going through the motions with obsolete strategies and budgeting exercises, and that’s where a focus on future-fitting your organization can be so beneficial.

You don’t need to be psychic

So the question then becomes, how should marketers approach thinking about the future, and how does it help when anticipating the next shift is impossible?

Conventional methods, like forecasting and predictions, serve marketers well in times with some stability. But in times of turbulence and disruption, these forecasts and predictions become impossible. That’s where worldbuilding might come into play. It’s an approach for marketing leaders to be able to anticipate and influence the world they’ll operate in — to plan for it.

It starts with signals. Marketers should be thinking: “What are you sensing in the world around you?” From there, these signals start to form trends, or patterns.

The trends begin to get categorized, such as technology trends or political trends. But, disruptions still occur. Some can be predicted, while others can’t. These disruptions alter the course of how these trends develop. But eventually, the trends begin to weave together, and from there, a future world begins to emerge.

Worldbuilding can be thought of as a framework to create decision rules. Consider the last time you set a marketing budget… now think about doing that now, but for the year 2026.

Worldbuilding can help build a story for what the next three years might look like, which allows you to make decisions about how signals, trends, and disruptions might bring us there. And that also gives you a way to anticipate how you might create a budget years from now.

How should CMOs embark on this?

Future-fit organizations need to embody five mindsets to build successful futurist capabilities:

1. The observer spends their time mostly focused on today. They may “observe,” curate and discuss future trends, and help determine how that translates back to the organization. They are in the know and interested in trends, but they don’t plan to proactively act on them but they share their insights with others
2. The responder is reactive. They build on the observations and develop strategies and tactics about what the organization should prioritize and react to. As soon as a disruption occurs, they develop strategic plans to address and get tactical.
3. The explorer is a curious futurist. They consider what might be likely to happen and the implications of those scenarios. They are proactive and prepared. They don’t wait for a disruption; they anticipate them.
4. The architect works inside out, designing the organization for the best possible future and building toward it with a clear sense of purpose
5. The luminary imagines multiple, alternate futures — some of them improbable. Luminaries tell us what might happen, and then look backward to fill in the blanks with steps to make that happen, including disruptions and trends to watch for.

Different situations call for different perspectives and no one perspective is better or more mature than the other. There are many times when futurists need to keep their audience and their goals in mind when communicating and advocating for plausible or preferred futures.

Each of these mindsets are complementary. Observers need to take action, or they’re just a bystander. A luminary who lacks a structured methodology is merely a dreamer. All five of these perspectives build an effective continuous foresight and futurist capability. Ensuring an organization has each of these mindsets means it will be positioned to thrive in this era of persistent disruption.

As CMOs look to adopt these mindsets, they must be cognizant of the following steps:

• Become anti-fragile. Assume disruption will continue at a frequency and scale equal to, or greater than, what has already occurred. This assumption is safer than expecting smooth sailing.
• Exploit complex adaptive systems. To thrive as a future-fit organization, CMOs need to anticipate and influence the world you will be operating in.
• Embrace the cognitive diversity of these five mindsets. Prepare for disruption and uncertainty by employing the five mindsets of a future-fit organization in strategic planning. CMOs must identify their and their organization’s predominant mindset, and learn how to flex between the others to future-fit their organization and its initiatives.

CMOs need to teach people to fight for the right to look into the future. It’s a concrete action that produces results. While predicting the future is a fool’s errand at the best of times, and a near-impossibility in 2023, CMOs that can perform decision-making under uncertainty will differentiate themselves enough to gain a competitive advantage.