The question we are most often asked at career crossroads is: “What should I do next?”
It feels like the right question. It is direct. It implies agency. It seems to cut straight to what matters.
But in practice, it often leads us in circles — because the question assumes that there is a single right answer waiting to be discovered, and that the task is simply to find it.
There is a different way to approach this. A way that is, in my experience, both more rigorous and more generative. It comes from strategic foresight.
The futures question
Instead of “what should I do next?”, try asking: “What futures do I want to be possible for me?”
Note the shift. It moves from a single, determinate outcome to a set of possibilities. It moves from a decision to a space — a landscape of futures that you want to keep open, or deliberately close.
This is not about avoiding the decision. You will still need to make one. But the decision lands differently when it is preceded by a genuine exploration of the possible.
The Futures Triangle applied to a life
The Futures Triangle is a foresight tool developed by Sohail Inayatullah. It maps three forces that shape any future:
- Pushes — the trends and drivers that are propelling you forward from the present
- Pulls — the images, visions, and attractors that are drawing you towards a particular future
- Weights — the history, habits, and structures that are slowing or constraining your movement
Applied to a career transition, the triangle surfaces something important: most people are very aware of the pushes (the thing I’m leaving, the pressures I’m under) and have some sense of the pulls (the vague image of what I want). But they underestimate the weights — the identity investments, the sunk costs, the stories they tell about who they are that make certain futures feel unavailable.
Surfacing the weights is often where the most important work happens.
Scenario planning for one
Scenario planning — the practice of developing multiple plausible futures — is usually applied to organisations. But it works remarkably well at the individual level.
The exercise: identify the two or three most critical uncertainties in your situation. These are not the things you are worried about — they are the genuine uncertainties that will most shape how your future unfolds.
For example: “Whether I choose to stay in my current sector or move to something new” and “Whether I prioritise financial security or meaning over the next five years.”
These two axes create four broad scenarios — four different versions of your future. None of them is the “answer.” But working through all four helps you understand which possibilities you want to keep open, which you are genuinely willing to foreclose, and which you have been avoiding thinking about.
The question under the question
In my experience working with professionals and leaders navigating major transitions, the most important question is rarely “what should I do next?”
It is usually something deeper: “Who am I becoming? What matters to me now? What have I learned about what I actually want, as opposed to what I have been told I should want?”
Foresight tools are valuable not because they answer these questions, but because they create the space in which the questions can emerge — and be held with the seriousness they deserve.
The future is not something you discover. It is something you build. And the first act of building is taking your own futures seriously enough to actually think about them.