The short version The Institute for the Future, where I did my futures thinking training, has released its Ten-Year Forecast for 2036. One of the ten forecasts says discernment will be the most essential human skill by then, replacing empathy as the soft skill we most want to teach in schools, train for at work, and build in our personal lives. In this episode I read that forecast, talk about why it caught my eye, and share how I practise discernment now: in low-stakes conversations about TV and culture, in the groups I belong to, in how I choose podcast guests, and in the moments when my own judgment was wrong. I also tell the story of how IFTF ran a pandemic simulation about ten years before COVID, and why that's the best case I know for practising the future before it arrives. Why a forecast about discernment stopped me I've been talking a lot lately about the skills we need for the future of work. People keep pointing out that soft skills are anything but soft, and the way IFTF defines discernment proves it. Here's the heart of the forecast, in my paraphrase. The era of "seeing is believing" is over. You can't just provide the receipts anymore, because receipts are easy to generate and fake with AI. So we need a new skill set to make sense of the world and decide what is right, what is real, what is good, and what is wise. That skill is discernment: the ability to judge what is trustworthy, relevant, and meaningful when evidence alone isn't enough and the facts themselves are unstable or contested. IFTF describes it as a combination of: critical thinking contextual awareness social sense-making taste moral judgment Put together, those help you decide what is real enough, right enough, good enough, and ultimately wise enough to act on. There's a piece of the forecast I keep coming back to, which IFTF calls neighborism. It means prioritizing local human truths, first-hand judgment, and accountability to the people you deal with every day over national media or online discourse. The forecast names the drivers too. Photos, video, audio, and data are easy to fake, so the authority of evidence collapses. Technical fixes like AI watermarks fail. And none of that changes the basic human need to know what's real and true so we can act and make good decisions. I don't think you can separate who you are at work from who you are at home, and discernment is a good example of why. It's an adaptive skill. It shapes your relationships, how you work, who you trust, how you make decisions about the future, and how you make sense of the past. That reach is exactly why it caught my attention. Read the forecast: IFTF Ten-Year Forecast 2036 — What We Choose Next Practising taste and judgment when the stakes are low I've written a few posts and recorded a few episodes about the human skills AI is bad at, especially taste and judgment. The question I keep asking is: how do you show those skills on an ongoing basis, in a way other people can see? One answer is that you practise them where the stakes are low. Art, culture, books, movies, and TV give us endless chances. How we talk about them, who we talk to, and how we use them to make sense of the world are all small exercises in discernment. Over the last few weeks on Threads, we've been talking about Slow Horses and The Diplomat. I've been writing about spoilers, the art of anticipation, and why we hate spoilers but love Easter eggs. All of that is taste and judgment on display, along with critical thinking about what those choices would mean if the stakes changed. When the stakes change: Ed Sheeran Here's an example of how quickly the stakes can shift. Earlier this year, Ed Sheeran told the world he had a Letterboxd account. It was charming. It made him relatable: yes, he's famous and wealthy, but he watches movies and wants to share what he thinks, just like the rest of us. People found the account fast, and as I understand it he ended up shutting it down because it got overrun. Low stakes. Then came the summer and the Macklemore situation. Macklemore declared his support for Palestine and was removed from the tour by the owners of the stadiums. Ed's response, as I read it, was not to get involved. Staying silent is a stance, and it blew up on him. No one expected Ed Sheeran to resolve the conflict in Gaza. But he has an enormous platform, millions of followers, and he has spoken out on other political situations before, like Ukraine. People expected him to use the accountability and authority he'd already taken on. To my mind, this is where the layers of discernment show up. Ed is one of the most successful musicians in the world, and his money still pales next to the people who own those stadiums and effectively run the business of live music. Discernment means understanding who actually makes the decisions, who is being coerced or intimidated, and who is showing courage in the face of impossible choices while people are dying. The stakes weren't just about who goes to a concert and who makes money. They were about whether you support a cause where people's lives are on the line. This is why you practise in advance. You don't control how the stakes change or how you're perceived, and you need to move deftly between what's nice to have and what's essential. I don't envy anyone in the public eye. Narratives shift. Words get misread because there often isn't enough context. Even with the best advisors in the world, the only thing you can really do is own who you are, what you stand for, and what your values are, and work from there. How I practise discernment: adjacent skills When I want to grow a skill, I look at the things next to it. Calm and meditation. I've built meditation into my walks, and a big reason I love it is that it improves my ability to notice. Noticing is central to futurism. You're watching for signals, building scenarios, applying foresight, and paying attention to how separate things converge. Listening. I'll be honest about why I started this podcast. I noticed I was interrupting people a lot. I didn't feel heard, I needed an outlet for my ideas, and that need was coming out as interruptions. So part of why I started the podcast was to learn to listen better, and then to trust the situation enough to express myself in a way that was productive. That's how this whole body of work came to be. I didn't start a podcast for the heck of it. I started it to practise a skill I wanted to improve: critical thinking, contextual awareness, listening. Are you listening so you can say something, or are you listening deeply, learning, making people feel seen and heard, and asking questions that move the conversation forward? There are levels of listening. What are you listening for? Language. I'm part of a linguistics group, a PR and crisis communications group, and a group focused on trust and leadership. Most of my futures work centres on communication: how we use language, how we understand, how we remember, how we anticipate, how we notice. Those groups are where I keep sharpening that. And of course there's the direct practice: futurism, consulting, advising. A key part of all of it is listening, noticing, and understanding that the people I work with need to practise these skills too. Trust, transparency, and going first The forecast talks about deciding what is right, what is good, and what is wise. That brings up trust. Who do you trust, and why? If you need to know everything, you aren't trusting anyone, and that's my problem with the idea that more transparency builds more trust. If you can see everything, you don't need to trust at all, because everything is disclosed. You're doing something else in that situation. So how do you learn to trust? The irony is that you usually have to be trustworthy first. You go first. You behave in ways other people can trust. The more trust you give, the more you earn. Choosing guests, and being wrong anyway When I'm deciding whether to invite someone onto the podcast, I'm looking for consistency. I follow people for a long time. I read their books, listen to their podcasts, and watch how they comment and engage. I usually only invite someone once I feel that who they are on one platform is who they are everywhere, that they are who they say they are. And it can still change once you're in the conversation. I had one guest I really wanted to like. On paper we had a lot in common. He showed up with slides and presented to me like it was 2010 and I was a student in his university class. When I questioned some of his data and how he presented it, he got upset. I had another guest who, in the middle of a video-recorded conversation, kept checking his phone. It was an hour-long call. Would you do that with the CEOs you advise? Who are you, and how do you decide who deserves your attention? I'd read all his books. I'd had productive conversations with him before. He still showed up in a way that made me feel like I didn't matter. I was floored. You can think you have the best discernment in the world and still be wrong. That's where self-awareness comes in: being open to feedback, rethinking what you thought you knew, unlearning, relearning, and continuing to reassess. That ongoing reassessment is discernment too. Waking up in 2036 This connects directly to Everyday Futurism, the idea I talk about all the time. How do you wake up inside a future scenario, whether that's six months, a year, 18 months, or ten years from now? Try it. Ten years from now: Who are you living with? What does breakfast look like? What are your habits? What does your work look like? Do you leave the house to go to work? Do you walk there? What does "work" even mean to you? Imagining your ordinary routines when certain things have changed helps you see what you'd need to work on now to make a future come to life. The pandemic simulation that came ten years early This is my favourite example of
