On the evening of his election night coverage, Daily Show host Jon Stewart closed out with a simple pronouncement: “Here’s what we know: that we don’t really know anything. And that we’re going to come out of this election and we’re going to make all kinds of pronouncements about what this country is and what this world is. And the truth is, we’re not really going to know s—.”

I was struck by how quickly his team had assembled clips of predictions in the wake of previous elections: in 2008, George Stephanopoulos predicted a post-racial America; in 2016, Democrats concluded that they would need a young candidate in order to win in 2020. Predictions that once seemed like certain realities gave way to unexpected outcomes.

But then I realized Stewart’s team could have prepared the same clips and the same message regardless of who won. Whatever the election result, the lessons would still need to be grounded in the same reality: We can’t predict the future.

This might be an odd thing to say for someone who’s practiced strategic foresight for the past decade. But foresight, despite its name, isn’t about predicting the future. It’s about thinking critically about possible futures so we can make better decisions about the present. It’s especially useful in uncertain times. Susanne Forchheimer at the Institute for the Future (where I’m an affiliate) defines it as “the process of turning facts about the present into plausible, provocative, and logical views of the future.”

I think that, as a discipline, strategic foresight has much to offer journalism, especially for those in product, strategy, and program roles. Here are four insights I’ve gathered from sharing foresight tools in journalism and product circles over the past year, and why I think this practice brings value to the field more broadly.

1. We can develop frameworks for the seemingly unpredictable — and calm our nervous systems as we feel more prepared.

At the News Product Alliance Summit, futurist and product leader Sam Guzik and I ran an interactive workshop involving Axes of Uncertainty, a common foresight method for looking at possible futures based on a simple 2×2 of uncertain conditions outside our control.

On one axis, our product workshop groups looked at the future of AI: considering a world where newsrooms need to rely on highly centralized AI run by a handful of large corporations against a future in which newsrooms develop their own AI solutions in-house. On the other axis, we looked at the future of revenue: imagining a future where newsrooms are funded through diversified streams and another in which they need to rely on increasingly centralized revenue streams.

In each quadrant, participants speculated how the future might unfold — from open source, community-driven AI to an even more precarious funding environment. All of these scenarios seemed plausible, even though not all were preferable. But after laying it all out, we discussed different ways to plan for each possible eventuality.

One takeaway: participants reported feeling a lot calmer about the future of journalism after the exercise. Even though the future was no less uncertain, we had some initial ways forward for thinking and planning through the 2×2 exercise. From there, product methodologies allow us to keep embracing experimentation at a lower cost.

As futurist Amy Webb wrote: “Companies, like people, have limbic systems… Your goal right now isn’t predictions. It’s preparation for what comes next. We must shift our mindset from making predictions to being prepared.”

2. We can critically analyze divergent opinions about the future, and then talk about what’s undergirding our perspectives.

At Media Party New York, I helped prime the hackathon after Nikita Roy’s keynote on AI and the future of news with a foresight facilitation method akin to the human spectrogram. The exercise is simple: share a statement about the future and ask people to locate themselves physically in the room based on what they think. One prompt that really divided the room and sparked generative conversation: “In 10 years, it will be impossible to know what’s real and what’s fake.” About half the room thought it would be impossible, another half thought it would be possible, and a healthy portion stood in the middle.

One takeaway: We broadly agreed on the forces shaping the future of truth, like the rise of deepfakes and decreased trust in institutions. But the divergence occurred in how we interpreted the data and what we thought its implications were. The point of this exercise wasn’t to decisively determine the future of truth and trust. The point was to facilitate critical conversations with smart people about what newsrooms can do differently.

3. We can work in transdisciplinary ways to examine the signals of change.

Media and information flows are ever changing. At the News Product Alliance Forum at CUNY, I shared about the Two Curves model, which helps us see possible futures that are emerging. In the Two Curves model, one curve, moving downward, represents the present way of doing things. Another curve, moving upward, represents a future way of doing things.

One curve we discussed six months ago is that today’s way of doing journalism might rely on blog posts, articles and videos, and in the future we may see a greater reliance on influencer networks of trust (a future that has played out in the 2024 election). Some signals of change on the horizon that we discussed included: Grid Zero and the rise of Instagram as a largely private platform, alongside increased use of other closed networks, like WhatsApp, Telegram, and Discord; the epidemic of loneliness the Surgeon General has warned about in the U.S., which is increasingly relevant globally according to the WHO; libraries as community centers, extending their traditional role as hubs of reading and learning and becoming more social.

One takeaway: In our increasingly complex world, to really think about the future of news, we have to think across disciplines: technology platforms, youth trends, global public health, and civic institutions. And even without once mentioning AI, we can already see massive implications for where the future of journalism might need to go — toward a more social experience that relies on networks of trust and community (something I wrote about in last year’s prediction).

4. It’s useful to get things wrong, and then ask why.

We can’t predict the future, but we have to plan for it, because the future shapes all of us, and we, in turn, shape the future. And for what it’s worth, I learn just as much from being wrong about the future as from being right.

To prepare for this article, I looked back on my first Nieman Lab prediction from 2016. I noted that “the humble GIF is also on the rise,” I couldn’t have been more wrong. TikTok was released that same year, and it’s transformed our relationship to media.

But in asking what I got wrong about that prediction, I learned about other factors that continue to shape short form video and, by extension, news consumption: the rapid closure of the digital divide, the rise of sync licensing in the music industry, the pandemic’s influence on online user patterns and even youth mental health. These factors all contribute to what might be a generational shift in how and why young people get the news, and it’s worth asking how journalists can adapt. (I’m encouraged to see that the American Press Institute is doing just that.)

Jon Stewart was right: This isn’t the end. It never is. What we see as we prepare for 2025 is another beginning, and now it’s time to make sense of it.

The practice of foresight is a discipline, a habit, a muscle that we can develop to make our strategic and product planning more agile and effective. It helps us think laterally and creatively, calm our nervous systems to support more grounded thinking, and continually critically analyze narratives about the future while building new ones.