Not Just Another Futurist

I. The problem with the category

Futurist is a strange word to put on a business card.

It promises something no one can deliver — knowledge of what hasn't happened yet. And the industry has largely organized itself around that promise. Trend reports. Scenario frameworks. Keynotes with confident slides about what the next decade holds. The implicit contract is: I have seen further than you, and for a fee, I will tell you what I saw.

The problem isn't that futures practitioners are dishonest. Most aren't. The problem is that the category has drifted toward the performance of certainty because that's what the market learned to buy. Leaders under pressure want answers. The futures industry learned to sell answers. The feedback loop did the rest.

What got lost in that drift is the harder, more useful work. Not what's coming — but how your organization is already thinking about what's coming. What you've assumed before you've started. What you've already ruled out without knowing you ruled it out. What looks like a decision that hasn't been made yet is actually three assumptions that solidified six months ago when no one was paying attention.

A habit becomes a norm. A workaround becomes a process. A preference becomes a policy. An untested assumption puts on a blazer and starts introducing itself as strategy. The distinction that gets lost in that progression is the one between what is normal and what has merely been normalized — and most futures work isn't designed to catch it.

That's not a futures problem. That's an epistemology problem. And most futures work isn't trained for it.

II. Where I came from instead

I didn't come to this work through futures. I came through a historiography course with Professor Pilgrim at Glendon College, York University, where I studied mathematics with a minor in history. Historiography isn't history — it's the study of how history gets written, how historians construct knowledge, what counts as evidence, and crucially, what assumptions a historian brings to the archive that shape what they're able to see before they've looked at anything.

The assigned reading included Robin Winks, who argued that historical reasoning is forensic reasoning. You work from traces — partial, ambiguous, sometimes contradictory — building the most defensible conclusion the evidence will support, staying in the question longer than is comfortable, treating the obvious explanation with suspicion. The mathematician in me recognized the same move from a different angle: find the axioms, find what the system is taking for granted before any conclusions follow, find the assumptions that feel like facts because no one has named them as assumptions yet.

I didn't know I was building a methodology. I thought I was just taking courses.

What those courses shared was a preoccupation with hidden architecture — the structure underneath what people call obvious. Mathematics looks for what a system is assuming before it starts producing conclusions. History shows that people do not simply find meaning; they construct it, usually with great confidence and selective memory. Between the proofs and the archives, the methodology was forming before it had a name.

III. The method turn

Historians work backward. They start with what they can observe in the present — the document, the artifact, the trace — and reason toward what must have happened to produce it. The past is fixed; the work is reconstructing it carefully from incomplete evidence.

At some point I realized futurists are doing the same thing in the opposite direction. The traces are still in the present, but the reasoning runs forward — toward what's forming rather than what happened, toward the assumption that's hardening rather than the one that already hardened. The discipline transfers almost exactly. The direction is the only thing that changes.

This sounds simple. It isn't, because most futures work doesn't actually operate this way. It operates predictively — here is what's coming, here is the trend, here is the probability. The forensic question, the historiographical question, gets skipped: what are we already assuming that's shaping what we can see? What have we already ruled out without knowing we ruled it out? Those questions require sitting with uncertainty longer than a trend deck allows, and they don't produce the kind of confident output the market learned to buy.

But they produce something more useful. Not a picture of the future — a clearer picture of the present, before the assumptions in it become the walls of the room.

IV. What the work actually is

When people ask what I do, I tell them I work with senior leaders early — before assumptions become policy, before the organization commits to a direction no one fully chose. That description usually produces a pause, because it doesn't fit the available categories. It isn't consulting in the traditional sense. It isn't coaching. It isn't futures work as most people have encountered it.

What is the Assumption-Ground Audit?

The Assumption-Ground Audit is a structured investigation into what an organization is taking for granted at the moment when there's still room to question it. The name is deliberate — ground, as in the foundation beneath the argument that doesn't get examined because everyone is busy examining what's built on top of it. It is forensic work done before assumptions become policy, when the traces are still readable and the most consequential decisions haven't yet been recognized as decisions.

Organizations do not make their biggest mistakes because they failed to gather information. They make them because they got attached to a story too early. They confuse repetition with truth. They mistake familiarity for inevitability. Because organizations are made of narratives as much as they are made of structures — people act on interpretations, on inherited scripts, on the stories they tell themselves about risk, legitimacy, and what counts as realistic. If you want to understand how a future gets made, you have to understand the stories that make certain futures feel available and others feel impossible before the evidence has had a fair hearing.

The work isn't about emerging technology specifically, though that's often what surfaces the need for it. It's about wherever assumptions are forming. Wherever the thinking is still open. Wherever the most consequential decisions are the ones no one has recognized as decisions yet. Technology is the current reason leaders call. The methodology is older than that, and it applies anywhere the ground is shifting before anyone has named the shift.

This is not adoption work. Not implementation. Not a roadmap. Those things have their place — later. What I'm doing is the stage before, when the forensic question still has a live answer and the traces are still readable. Once the assumptions become policy, the work changes entirely. You're no longer asking what are we taking for granted. You're asking how did we get here — and that's a much harder conversation to have.

I work earlier than that, when the ground is still moving.

V. Why this moment

The temptation is to treat this as a moment — a disruption to navigate, a transition to manage, a change to adopt and move past. That framing is understandable. It's also wrong, and the wrongness is consequential.

What's actually happening is that change is coming from multiple directions simultaneously, and what creates the real inflection points aren't the individual streams — it's where they converge. Organizations that are watching any one of those streams carefully may still be caught off guard, because the assumptions they built around each stream in isolation don't hold when the streams meet.

Consider what's converging right now. War driving energy price volatility. AI and automation changing what work gets done and by whom. A labour market that already reorganized itself around flexibility. Remote and distributed work that proved, at scale, that presence and productivity are not the same thing. These are not separate stories. They are streams that are crossing, and the crossing point is where the assumptions get stress-tested fastest.

Return to office mandates are the clearest example of what happens when an organization bets on one stream without examining the convergence. The assumption — that office presence drives productivity, culture, and control — became policy. What didn't get examined was every other force moving simultaneously in the opposite direction. Commercial real estate interests created political and economic pressure to reverse what the evidence was showing. The mandate landed. The convergence didn't stop.

But the alternative didn't hold either. The romantic version of distributed work — work from anywhere, talent unchained from geography — assumed a stable geopolitical backdrop that is no longer available. Geopolitical unrest has made borders less porous. The cost of flights has risen. Airports have become sites of surveillance and friction rather than easy passage. The freedom of movement that "work from anywhere" depended on is contracting at the same moment that the case for returning to a central office is weakening. Organizations are caught between two assumptions, both of which were built for a world that has since moved.

This is why the forensic work isn't a project. It's a capacity. The question — what are we taking for granted that we haven't named yet — doesn't get asked once and answered. It gets asked on a cadence, because the convergences keep forming and the traces in the present keep changing. Organizations that treat assumption-examination as a one-time exercise are building for a stable world. The world they're actually operating in is one that's constantly reinventing itself from multiple directions at once, and the most dangerous moment is when those directions cross.

The mainstream futures industry is not well positioned to help with this, not because the practitioners aren't skilled, but because the industry organized itself around describing what's coming from any given direction. Convergences are harder. They require holding multiple streams in view simultaneously and asking what an organization is assuming about each one that won't hold when they meet. That's a different discipline. And in a world where the crossings are accelerating, it's the discipline that compounds.

VI. The title paid off

So. Not just another futurist.

Not because the word is beneath me, but because it doesn't describe the work accurately enough to be useful. Futurist points forward, toward what's coming, toward the horizon. What I'm doing is closer to what Winks described — working the scene, reading the traces, asking what the evidence suggests before the story hardens into the only story anyone can tell.

The formation was mathematics and historiography. The method is forensic. The direction is forward. And the specific skill — the one that took the longest to name — is holding multiple streams in view simultaneously and watching for where they cross. Not predicting the crossing. Not forecasting what it will produce. Catching the assumptions an organization is carrying into it before the convergence makes those assumptions expensive.

That's the work. And it doesn't end, because the convergences don't end. The streams keep moving, keep crossing, keep producing moments where what an organization took for granted in one context meets what it took for granted in another, and the meeting point is where the ground shifts fastest.

You can't buy a map for that terrain. You can build the capacity to read it — to stay in the question long enough, to treat the obvious explanation with suspicion, to find what's being assumed before it becomes the foundation. That's what Pilgrim was teaching — through Winks — in a historiography classroom, about a completely different problem. It turns out it was the same problem.

I work with the leaders who are ready to ask that question early. Before the assumptions become policy. Before the organization commits to a direction no one fully chose. When the convergences are still forming and the traces are still readable and the work is still possible in the way that matters most.

That's not a futures practice. It's an older discipline, pointed in a new direction.