FUTURE SMART

Information is cheap. Persuasion is cheap. Answers arrive in seconds, and the world has become more connected and more tangled at the same moment. The result for many capable people is a low, constant feeling of being slightly behind, slightly fooled, and slightly out of the loop.

Future Smart offers a practical response: twelve thinking tools, each small enough to use this week. Written by a corporate instructional designer with two decades of experience teaching adults complex material under tight deadlines, the book is built around one capability: making better decisions when things change faster than your habits.
Each chapter follows the same format: a real-world story, the new problem, one named tool, the common trap, a ten-minute practice, and a Monday assignment that produces something you can use, such as a decision, a test, a revised rule, or a verification step.

You will learn how to:

• Recognize persuasion aimed at you and verify before you act
• Look at any decision from several perspectives
• Build skills through small, repeatable habits
• Understand the feedback loops and incentives behind recurring problems
• Protect focus and prioritize commitments
• Build trust and psychological safety on teams
• Identify common thinking errors and test your own beliefs
• Manage money, time, and attention as one portfolio
• Design learning that you can measure by what you can do afterward
• Ask better questions of people and of machines