Good futurists (foresight speakers) present important and potentially relevant ideas, trends, data, and questions about the changing competitive environment to your stakeholders, in a way that entertains, inspires, and generates robust discussion and better strategy, plans, and actions. I’ve been a full-time futurist since 2000, and have delivered keynotes to hundreds of satisfied audiences.

Good foresighters (foresight professionals) help your team improve strategic discussions about the future, elicit and map diverse and relevant opinions, uncover implicit assumptions and key disagreements, find better data, models, drivers, trends, constraints, and weak signals to reduce uncertainty, and generate improved forecasts, scenarios, real options, and plans. Above all they should help you identify, benchmark and strengthen your current foresight process and culture, so that stakeholders can get better at identifying and reaching preferred futures. I’ve developed undergraduate and graduate courses in foresight, and I consult in foresight process and culture for dozens of leaders and their organizations.

Futurists and foresighters may not know more than you about the long-term future, especially in your subspecialty. But the better ones are constantly learning, teaching, and consulting about global and industry trends, innovations, and strategic responses to change, and can help you and your team see and adapt ahead of your competitors. In a world of accelerating technological change, good foresight process and culture are incredibly valuable to every leader and organization. Let’s talk and see if I can bring value to your audience and your team.

John Smart is CEO of Foresight U (Ann Arbor, MI and Los Gatos, CA), a foresight learning and development organization, and president of the Acceleration Studies Foundation, a nonprofit studying adaptiveness under conditions of accelerating technological change. He is also founder of FERN, the Foresight Education and Research Network, creating curriculum for the 22 MS/PhD programs globally that offer strategic foresight degrees.

Before launching ASF John spent nine years as an educational and software entrepreneur, co-founding and building Hyperlearning, an educational services company sold to The Princeton Review in 1996. He is a lecturer on leadership and technological change at the Naval Postgraduate School (Monterey, CA), an advisor in foresight and forecasting at Singularity University (Mountain View, CA), and a technical advisor to NextIT (Spokane, WA), a leader in intelligent virtual assistant (IVA) platforms. John has authored several next-gen IT foresight studies, including the Metaverse Roadmap, the Conversational Interface and Open Internet TV. His new book, The Foresight Guide: Being a Leader in Anticipating, Creating and Managing the Future, is free online now and debuts on Amazon in 2018.

As a scholar, John is co-founder of the Evo Devo Universe research community, an international community researching evolutionary and developmental processes of change, and a member of the ECCO research group at VUB (Brussels, Belgium). 

John has a BS in business administration from UC Berkeley, an MS in futures studies from the University of Houston, a BS-equivalency in biology from UC San Diego, an MS-equivalency in physiology and medicine (two years of medical school and the USMLE-I) from UC San Diego School of Medicine, and has done postbaccalaureate studies in biological, cognitive, computer, and physical sciences at UC San Diego, UCLA, and UC Berkeley. He studied living systems theory at UCSD under the mentorship of James Grier Miller (Living Systems, 1978), who mentored under process philosopher Alfred North Whitehead. Dr. Miller encouraged John to pursue multi-scale studies in technological, economic, and social change from a complex adaptive systems perspective.

John’s twitter account is @johnmsmart. He blogs at Medium and Substack on foresight and leadership.