Future Pacing

• Difficulty: Intermediate
• Estimated effectiveness: High
• Implementation time: Short
• Fields of application: Sales, Management, Coaching, Mediation, Real estate
• Synonyms: Future projection, Future anchoring, Directed mental simulation
• Tags: future pacing, projection, NLP, mental simulation, commitment

Future pacing makes a decision concrete and desirable by having it experienced before it is taken: it converts an abstract pitch into an anticipated experience and creates a mental commitment. Its weakness: it rests on the credibility of the projection, an idealised future contradicted by the facts turns into scepticism, or even lasting cynicism.

To be used after identifying the real need, in order to anchor the benefits and lift the fear of change, in sales, in management or in de-escalation. To be avoided when no tangible benefit can be honoured, and to be dosed carefully: too insistent, it tips into pressure. Unsuited to purely technical, figure-driven decisions.

Recognise: you are made to imagine a bright future in detail ('imagine, in six months...') before any objections have even been addressed. Neutralise: bring the projection back to the verifiable present ('Concretely, what do you commit to in writing as of today?'). Turn it around: project in turn a future that includes the risks to rebalance the image and test the soundness of the promise.

Future pacing becomes manipulation when it dangles a future known to be improbable, or when it exploits vulnerability (emotional blackmail in a family context, false promises in a crisis). Ethics requires a sincere and deliverable projection: having someone imagine a real benefit is legitimate, selling unverifiable dreams is not.

Close to anchoring and to benefit selling; combines with storytelling and the projection question. The defensive variant consists in projecting the future of disagreement (the costs of a failure) rather than that of the agreement. To be distinguished from the mere description of features, which does not engage the imagination.

• Peter Gollwitzer, 'Implementation Intentions: Strong Effects of Simple Plans', American Psychologist, 1999.
• Richard Bandler & John Grinder, Frogs into Princes: Neuro Linguistic Programming, 1979.
• Robert Cialdini, Pre-Suasion: A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade, 2016.

• Get the other party to mentally experience the situation following the agreement so as to make the benefits concrete, sensory and desirable rather than abstract.
• Reduce the perception of risk: a decision already 'experienced' in imagination seems more familiar, more likely and less daunting to take.
• Increase the likelihood of closing by exploiting the simulation heuristic: what is easily imagined seems more plausible and more attainable.
• Bring hidden objections to the surface: it is often by projecting themselves into implementation that the other party voices their real reservations (budget, internal sign-off, timeline).
• Place the relationship within a future continuity that goes beyond the one-off transaction and paves the way for retention.

Sales · The cable experiment in Tempe (Gregory, Cialdini and Carpenter, 1982): A real, documented case. In a field study carried out in Tempe (Arizona), researchers compared two canvassing pitches for a cable television subscription. The first group of households received a classic presentation of the service's advantages. The second was invited to imagine themselves concretely enjoying it ('Picture yourself one evening, at home, choosing among these programmes...'). A few weeks later, when the actual commercial offer was made, the households that had practised this projection into the future subscribed in a markedly higher proportion (roughly double) than those who had received only the information. This study is regarded as the reference experimental demonstration of the mechanism underlying future pacing: imagining a future scenario that concerns us increases both its perceived probability and the move to act.

Business · Representative scenario: negotiating a software deal by making the next quarter come alive: Representative scenario (not attributed to real people). A software vendor is negotiating with an operations director who is reluctant on price. Rather than defending her rate, she shifts the conversation into the future: 'Let's place ourselves next March. Your three planning officers arrive on Monday morning: the week's schedule is already generated, the team conflicts flagged automatically. Concretely, what would they do with the half-day recovered each week?' The director gets caught up in it, describes the use he would make of it, then raises the real objection himself: change management with the teams. The negotiation then swings from price to deployment support, ground on which an agreement is reached. Future pacing made the value tangible and brought the real objection, hidden behind the pricing discussion, to the surface.

• Projecting too early, before genuinely diagnosing the needs: the projection rings hollow, seems tacked on and triggers mistrust instead of buy-in.
• Staying generic ('you'll see, it'll be wonderful') instead of building a precise, dated and sensory future, fed by the information given by the other party themselves.
• Painting an excessively idyllic future: overselling creates a dissonance at the first real friction and destroys trust, and thus the long-term relationship.
• Imposing the scenario instead of co-building it: a hammered-out 'once you've signed...' is experienced as manipulative pressure; effective future pacing invites the other party to describe that future themselves.
• Never confronting the promised future with reality after the agreement: without follow-up, the technique becomes an empty promise and jeopardises any future negotiation.

• W. Larry Gregory, Robert B. Cialdini, Kathleen M. Carpenter (1982) Self-relevant scenarios as mediators of likelihood estimates and compliance: Does imagining make it so? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 43(1), 89-99, DOI: 10.1037/0022-3514.43.1.89
• Daniel Kahneman, Amos Tversky (1982) The simulation heuristic in Kahneman, Slovic & Tversky (eds.), Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases, Cambridge University Press
• Robert B. Cialdini (2016) Pre-Suasion: A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade Simon & Schuster, New York