NEWSLETTER EXCLUSIVE · FROM THE FUTURIST TOOLKIT The When-Then Board This tool appears only here, in the email. It does not go on Substack, LinkedIn, or the show. Most planning tools ask you to predict what will happen. This one asks you to decide, in advance, what you will do when something specific happens, so the decision is already made on the day you would otherwise be too rattled to make it. It is the simplest version of a discipline that serious foresight teams run on a wall, and it...
5 days ago • 5 min read
NEWSLETTER EXCLUSIVE · FROM THE FUTURIST TOOLKIT The Trigger Board, Pocket Version This week's essay argues that anxiety loops while foresight completes. This is the tool that does the completing, and it only appears here, never on Substack or LinkedIn. Four moves, one recurring worry, ten minutes. 1. Name it. Write the worry as a scenario with a title and a timeframe. "Everything becomes irrelevant" becomes "a platform shift pulls my audience somewhere I am not, within two years." Vague...
11 days ago • 2 min read
Week in Review · Issue 53 Hi Reader, Funny thing about writing this week's issue. Halfway through an essay arguing that everyone now has a superpower they barely use, I caught myself doing a research task the slow way out of pure habit, the exact behavior the essay diagnoses. I stopped, ran my own robot question, and got the afternoon back. Physician, heal thyself. So this week I built you the version I wish I had been running all along, below, and it is only in this email. Steve For Email...
18 days ago • 2 min read
Future Proof Thoughts from the Near Future Ideas on Thursday. Practice on Friday. Issue 52 | Friday, August 28, 2026 A few months ago I opened the folder where I clip everything that might matter someday, scrolled back through several hundred entries, and had to admit the truth. I had not built an instrument. I had built a junk drawer. This week's issue is about that admission, and about the quiet inversion almost nobody has priced in: information used to be the scarce resource, and now the...
25 days ago • 2 min read
THOUGHTS FROM THE NEAR FUTURE WITH STEVE FISHER Week in Review · Issue 50 Hi Reader, welcome back. I am starting to send a summary of the week since so much goes out and many miss it so here's everything from this week across the network. FUTURE PROOF · ISSUE 50 The Signal vs. the Storm: Staying Anchored in Chaos There are two ways to fail at reading your environment right now, and both are common among leaders who are otherwise excellent at their jobs. One looks like attentiveness. The other...
about 2 months ago • 1 min read
Adapt Like a Startup: Strategic Resilience for Humans Future Proof Dispatch #6 Adapt Like a Startup: Strategic Resilience for Humans I have spent most of my adult life helping organizations adapt. Startups, Fortune 500s, nonprofits, and institutions face different pressures, but they all grapple with the same fundamental question: How do we stay relevant in a world that is changing faster than our systems were designed to handle? What I’ve learned over the years is that startups tend to adapt...
over 1 year ago • 7 min read
SuperShifts: A Field Guide for the Age of Intelligence Future Proof Dispatch #5 SuperShifts: A Field Guide for the Age of Intelligence When I first started writing what would become SuperShifts, I was not trying to predict the future. Futurists don't do that. I was trying to make sense of the world I was already living in. A world where every assumption I had grown up with about stability, identity, work, and leadership was coming apart faster than most of us knew how to process. A world...
over 1 year ago • 6 min read
The Myth of Control: Why Most Plans Fail Fast Future Proof Dispatch #4 The Myth of Control: Why Most Plans Fail Fast I was a control freak. Maybe it was my adult ADHD and the quest for perfectionism. Maybe it was not trusting the people I hired to do a better job, out of my insecurity. But I was a micro manager in life and work for 25 years. What broke me? A startup or two with funding and milestones. A film project with 200 volunteers and a release date that I couldn't move. I had to let...
over 1 year ago • 7 min read
Reinvention is the Only Long-Term Career Plan Future Proof Dispatch #3 Why Reinvention Is the Only Long-Term Career Plan There was a time when career advice felt more like folklore—predictable, passed down, quietly reassuring. You were supposed to pick a lane early, get really good at something, and -stay consistent, and success would follow. Maybe you’d move up the ladder slowly, maybe you’d make a few strategic jumps, but if you stayed the course, you’d be rewarded. It wasn’t just a...
over 1 year ago • 8 min read
