Dr. Neil Hair

I recently had the pleasure of serving on a panel of RIT forward thinkers for the Wallace Center at RIT. Liz Lawley, Enid Cardinal, Ryne Raffaelle and Mike Johansson gathered with the purpose of identifying top practices or tips for forward thinking. Several gems were shared including;

1. Consider your network sacred – it holds all of the answers to future problems if you engage or follow the right people.

2. Forget local news – focus on whats happening internationally in science and technology and make a daily commitment to it.

3. Shower, drive, day dream, and find yourself in waiting rooms more often. The down time of these daily events and activities can provide great 'thinking time' to ponder problems and solutions.

4. Play more! See exploration of new things as a form of play time. Give yourself an hour and invest in exploration of new software, worlds, techniques, stuff.. low risk, low investment, high potential ROI.

5. Learn to spot patterns of conversation in social networks – who shares common insights on issues that are not normally related or connected to each other? A great way of spotting higher level patterns of thinking regards new concepts.

6. Have FUN more often thinking about the future. Pontificate – naval gaze – identify common problems that might be solved by a little additional investment of time and energy.

7. Fail more! Its ok to FAIL. Failure shows us what the limitations of a system are, and how we might pick ourselves up and succeed more often.

8. Join the dots more. Plan on paper, problems towards possible solutions. Think about goals. A goal-less life is an unhappy life (or is it?).

9. Don't allow yourself the luxury of the 'I have no time to think about the future' argument. You have plenty of time to watch TV, read books / magazines, surf the net.

10. Think backwards. Chart a position in the future. Picture it – and then work backwards. Like setting goals, backward scenario planning can do wonders for forward thinking.