Where Will You Be in 10 Years?

Here's how to figure it out and start working toward that future vision now.

- By Keith Ferrazzi. Illustration by Nicolás Ortega

Successful people, and successful companies, tend to follow a similar path: The changes they make from year to year seem orderly, but over decades, the changes can take on an unexpected, nonlinear shape.

For example, I began my career as an entrylevel analyst at Deloitte. Now I run a thriving growth-coaching business. The leap directly from one to the other seems absurd, and looking back, I couldn't have foreseen or planned it. But broken down into smaller steps, it makes sense: One job led to another, and an opportunity here created a logical new opportunity there. This is the magic of uncertainty: Our paths are forged in satisfying but unknowable ways.

But it can be hard to know what to do with this knowledge because nobody likes to feel adrift, and especially not entrepreneurs. Leaders shouldn't be content to just see where things go. They don't leave their businesses to chance. They want to anticipate changes, plan for the unexpected, and plot a course into tomorrow. Is any of that possible?

Nobody can predict the future, of course, but I have found a tactic that I believe gives leaders the best possible chance. It comes from John Hagel, the retired co-chairman of Deloitte's Center for the Edge, and he calls it Zooming Out and Zooming In. With this exercise, John invites leaders to take leaps of imagination in which growth is nonsequential and exponential-very different from traditional, linear, do-this-and-then-that, three-year growth-planning projections. The exercise also helps your team develop a shared long-term vision and a road map for making decisions. Having run a number of clients through this exercise, I've found that the results can be transformative.