Wave after wave of disruption promises continual changes to the global economy. Historians will be able to look back and draw lines between before and after disruptive events, but living in the middle is messy. One critical skill in the face of this uncertainty is horizon scanning. The Institute for the Future’s Bob Johansen — who has been a futurist since 1973 — describes the process of horizon scanning as turning foresight about future possibilities into insight about future realities, and insight into action. In a class on the subject at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College, I teach four essential behaviors of good horizon scanners.

[Here is the first.]

1. Curiosity

First, good horizon scanners are curious. They live the line spoken by science fiction writer William Gibson: “The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed.” To bring this concept to life, I have students write a “report from the future,” where they personally try an emerging technology that’s new to them and reflect on the experience. Examples include using AI to write a song or code, using 23andMe to trace their ancestry, participating in e-sports, or buying a nonfungible token.

An inevitable finding from the experience is that there is a huge difference between reading about a technology and experiencing it firsthand. One student, for example, was blown away by how developed e-sports is and noted how Amazon turned an early insight into action when it bought streaming platform Twitch for $970 million in 2014.

One of my own examples is taking a robotaxi during a recent trip to San Francisco. I found the experience decidedly mixed. It was cool, for sure, but there were several times where what would be simple for a human proved to be complex for the algorithm powering my car. For example, at one point, we got stuck at a right turn because a pedestrian had stepped off the curb into the road while waiting for the walk signal, and the car’s algorithm told it to stop and wait for the person to cross. The technology will surely improve, but it will require significant systemwide change for robotaxis to reach mass adoption.

Regulations and norms around robotaxis are still being formulated. There will be significant system-level changes before there is mass adoption. System-level change takes time and is unpredictable. On the other hand, you can plan for demographic change. There will be more people in Africa in 30 years than there are now. If you are a high-volume consumer goods company, you can confidently invest ahead of that change. The lesson: Bet on demographics, but hedge on systems.

After spending 37 minutes pushing for increased spending on foreign aid and defense, Kennedy spent his final eight minutes talking about space exploration. “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth,” he said. “No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind or more important for the long-range exploration of space.”

Kennedy’s vision was compelling. You can picture it. You can feel it. “Our brains are wired for stories,” Johansen once said. “And if they don’t hear stories, they make them up.” Creatively communicating future possibilities is a powerful way to motivate a group to act through uncertainty.

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In times of uncertainty, it feels tempting to throw your hands up and declare it impossible to see what’s coming next. It might indeed be impossible to get it precisely right. Don’t curse the darkness. Light a candle. Horizon scanning — the effort to turn foresight into insight, and insight into action — will help you when the next unexpected thing happens.