Twenty Years, Give or Take
How a Missouri State University Geography grad ended up in a Beatle wig while also doing strategic foresight work for global corporations…and more
Around 2001, I was a Geography student at Missouri State while also working musician and learning to sing by listening to the Beatles, which mostly meant I was a guy with a guitar, a course load, and loads of Beatles CDs on rotation in my car. One night, while listening to John Lennon's voice come out of a speaker (the voice of a man who had been gone for two decades) I had a thought that wouldn't leave me alone:
How long until his voice could be recreated for something new?
I was not a computer scientist. I had no roadmap, no white paper, no insider knowledge. But auto-tune was being used for vocals on pop radio by 2000, and something in me went: oh. That's the front edge of something. And then something else in me, with no evidence whatsoever, said twenty years.
Not "someday." Not "in my lifetime." Twenty.
That was my first futurist thought, although I didn't have the vocabulary for it yet. I just thought I was a music nerd with a hunch.
What I was actually feeling
Years later, in the Foresight program at the University of Houston, I learned the name for what my gut had been doing. It's called Three Horizons.
Horizon 1 is the current system. In this case, tape, a mixing board, and a human throat.
Horizon 3 is the emerging system, the one that operates on completely different logic such as a voice with no body, and generated rather than captured.
Horizon 2 is the messy, awkward, often-mocked transition zone where the new logic first shows up wearing the old system's clothes. Auto-tune was Horizon 2. A machine fixing a human voice, then reshaping it, then replacing it. I wasn't forecasting a product. I was feeling a different system coming into the room.
Three Horizons famously has no timeline on it. But if you lay out the recent past and let each horizon run roughly a decade, twenty years to a fully realized Horizon 3 is a perfectly reasonable estimate. My gut had done the arithmetic without showing its work.
Lo and behold, the Beatles released "Now and Then" in 2023 which featured machine learning that pulled Lennon's voice cleanly off a muddy cassette demo, fixed and enhanced it, and put him back in the band. Twenty-two years after the thought. Close enough for a guy with a guitar and a hunch.
Then I learned to use foresight on purpose
That experience set the pattern for how I work now which starts with where most people who try to anticipate the future begin: forecasting. Numbers, curves, extrapolations. I even chased that instinct far enough to eventually pick up a graduate certificate in Data Analytics.
But here's the problem with numbers alone: extrapolation is excellent at Horizon 1 and nearly useless at Horizon 3. Data describes the system you already have. The felt sense of "something is shifting" often arrives years before the data does, and most organizations have no legitimate way to process it, so they ignore it or throw it away. I don't throw it away. I built a practice around a hybrid of quantitative projection and qualitative foresight research, rigorous enough to defend in a boardroom, open enough to catch the thing the spreadsheet can't see.
The Alzheimer's project that was secretly about AI
About eleven years ago, as a foresight student, I conducted a project about the ten-year future of Alzheimer's disease. and when you go looking into the brain, you keep bumping into people who aren't trying to heal one but trying to build one.
So I developed a side scenario, a margin note, that said in about ten years, machine intelligence would stop being a research topic and become a geopolitical race cold-war framing, national strategy, front-page headlines, every day.
That was from a side scenario in a project about a brain disease. The lesson I took from it is one I bring to every client: the most important signal for the future of your industry is usually sitting in the margins of somebody else's research. That's why I scan wide, and why I take the weird adjacent finding seriously instead of cutting it for length.
And yes — I'm also a Beatle
The branding of my consulting has a much deeper meaning to me as I have found a symbiosis between my two careers. Consider the serendipity occurred while as a foresight student.
2015: I’m foresight student and Beatle enthusiast performing solo in a hotel lobby. I play Lennon’s song “Jealous Guy” and shortly after a man approaches me to give a tip and say that he just gave a pep talk to his employees using Lennon quotes and thanked me for contributing to the theme. Always ready to pitch my foresight services, I tell him of my futuring skills and he bites, leading to my first paid project.
2017: While attending a local conference in an attempt to stir up leads in my futuring services, I met Louis Harrison (a presenter at the conference and George’s sister) and the man who plays her brother in an international touring Beatle tribute group that she founded. I tell him of my ability to sound like Lennon and within two months I was performing as a Beatle on a cruise ship out of England. I continued full-time for two years before completing my foresight degree. Now I perform part-time as John Lennon and/or George Harrison for many touring Beatles tribute groups.
My favorite line on my résumé is that I a song I wrote was once one of two state finalists selected for the John Lennon Student Song Scholarship, which means Lennon has been quietly funding my career for over twenty years now, one way or another.
People assume that my performing has nothing to do with the foresight work. It's the opposite. Not only does Lennon invite you to imagine a different future, I would argue that a tribute show is a scenario.
It isn't a prediction and it isn't a lie. It's a plausible, internally consistent, fully immersive alternative reality that an audience agrees to stand inside for two hours. Every detail from the gear and the accent to the between-song banter either holds the world together or breaks it. That is precisely the standard a good scenario has to meet in a strategy workshop. Vague futures change nobody's behavior. A future you can feel in your body changes what people do on Monday.
Playlist: Seth as Lennon
Playlist: Seth as George
Intuition without method is a horoscope. Method without intuition is a spreadsheet that confidently misses the future. Twenty-five years ago I had one and not the other; I've spent my career assembling both. If you want to know what's coming for your organization and what to do about it on Monday, let's talk!
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