The last half of the article by La Piana Consulting in the Winter 2010 Outcomes has a section title that says Be a Futurist. In this section they talk at length about how organizations can learn about the changes going on, study them, and then adapt.
This will require studying the changes around us, listening to uncomfortable analysis, and putting forth the serious intellectual effort to grasp new things. That is essentially becoming a futurist.
Making that transition will be hard. My natural tendency is to be more reactive than forward thinking. That is the approach of most people I hang around with.
For me, the breakthrough idea is when they suggest we all need to be futurists. We all need to make the transition to studying and analyzing trends and guessing future developments. That way we can adapt to the rapid and crazy changes instead of continually being washed over by change and feeling like the deer-caught-in-the-headlights (sorry for the mixed metaphors!)
Putting this into the concept of being a futurist describes the attitudinal change we all need to make.
