PwC: You are often referred to as a futurist. What does that term mean to you, and is that how you define yourself?

AZ: I actually prefer foresight researcher or global trends analyst. A lot of what I do is about looking at critical places—where you can see future trends emerging that are going to be definitive for the whole planet or for a culture or an industry—and then thinking through with senior leaders about how those trends might shape the global operating environment.

PwC: You refer to these as intersections.

AZ: That’s right. The big ones that I pay attention to are demographics, globalization, environmental issues, some global policy—especially global business issues—and emerging technologies. But the most fruitful terrain lies between those vertical areas of focus. For example, it’s not so much demographics as it is the effect of demographics on healthcare, public policy, or the environment. What I do is develop visions of the future that share key themes and that help senior leadership teams look just a little bit further out. Sometimes you should act on great opportunities while they’re still over the horizon.

PwC: So how should companies be engaging a foresight researcher like you, and how far out should they be looking?

AZ: First, companies should work with foresight researchers to perform what I like to call environmental scanning—that is, scanning within such defining driving areas as demographics, emerging technologies, and economics to get a sense of how those environments are unfolding. Companies should then develop scenarios that look specifically at how the individual data points in each one of those areas might unfold. I think organizations should do environmental scanning every year. And they might want to do scenarios every three to five years.

PwC: Can you describe a typical scenario-building process?

AZ: The process begins by identifying key uncertainties. For example, a current key uncertainty right now involves the American economy. Will it go into recession, and—more important—will it drag down the global economy in the process? Another key uncertainty is about the price of oil.
If you place just those fundamental macro drivers on a two-by-two grid, you can envision four different worlds that suggest a number of future policy implications. What you’re really after when you’re developing scenarios are data rich stories that are expressed in a number of ways. A scenario that draws on only the left hemisphere of the brain—the one that’s all charts and numbers—misses the nuances. The reality is, we’re not exclusively rational creatures. We’re semirational creatures who make decisions based on our emotions and our own experience. Our visions of the future need to reflect that.

PwC: You mentioned a number of powerful drivers. What should companies focus on in terms of some of the major trends that you see?

AZ: First of all, demographics are critical. Historically, the American population architecture has looked like a pyramid—with young people significantly outnumbering older people—but the baby boomers are creating a big bulge in the middle. Over the course of the next two decades, we’re going to see a new population structure emerge in the United States. Instead of a pyramid, that structure will resemble an hourglass, the two ends of which will represent the largest number of old and young people who have ever coexisted in our society’s history. This will result in some interesting paradoxes. Let’s take the workforce, for example. Many boomers soon will be retiring, but many will stay on the job. That creates a paradox for Generation Xers. Many will move up the management chain much sooner than their predecessors did. Others will get trapped behind a new glass ceiling created by boomers who won’t or can’t retire.