---
title: Anticipatory Thinking
description: 'Gary Klein''s cognitive model for preparing for uncertain futures: pattern
  matching, trajectory tracking, and conditional simulation rather than prediction.'
doc_version: '1.0'
last_updated: '09-May-26'
canonical_url: https://garden.johanneskleske.com/anticipatory-thinking
---

*A cognitive skill from military psychology that foresight is now borrowing*

---

Anticipatory Thinking doesn't come from futures studies. Gary Klein developed it around 2007, working with military professionals, firefighters, and emergency responders: people making consequential decisions in fast-moving situations where prediction is impossible. The question he was trying to answer was what experts actually do when they prepare for futures they can't predict.

The answer turned out to involve three distinct mental moves.

The first is pattern matching. Experts read the present against a library of past situations. Not calculating, not forecasting, just recognizing. A firefighter entering a burning building isn't running a simulation. She's asking, consciously or not, what this smoke pattern has meant before, and whether what she's seeing fits. The signal that something is off, that a building is about to collapse, comes from a mismatch between current observations and the mental model her experience has built.

The second is trajectory tracking. Rather than fixing on a single expected future, practiced anticipators keep watching how a situation is moving: where the momentum is, what rate of change suggests about what comes next. Less about endpoints, more about direction. A sail trimmer isn't asking where the wind will be in an hour. He's reading what the water and the clouds and the boat's feel are suggesting about the next few minutes.

The third Klein calls conditional thinking, or prospective branching: if this happens and that develops, then probably this. Sketching forward into several plausible chains without committing to any of them. The question isn't “what will happen” but “what are the linked consequences of what's already in motion.”

The relationship to foresight is worth naming. Foresight is methodological and organizational: it gives teams and institutions structured ways to explore uncertainty together. Anticipatory Thinking is cognitive and individual. It's the mental capacity that makes a practitioner good at foresight in the first place. One is a practice. The other is what you bring to it.

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## Connections

[[OODA Loop]] — closest conceptual cousin. Boyd's Orient phase is, in a sense, anticipatory thinking applied to real-time decisions. Both frameworks emerged from high-stakes operational contexts, and both center on the quality of mental models rather than the speed of prediction.

[[Risk and Uncertainty]] — AT operates in Frank Knight's territory of genuine uncertainty. Klein's framing of it as “future-oriented sensemaking” connects directly to Weick's sensemaking, which comes up in that note.

[[Scenario Planning]] — Shell's Pierre Wack described scenarios as “prepared imagination.” Anticipatory Thinking is the individual cognitive correlate: the capacity for prepared imagination before the scenarios even begin.

[[Futures Studies]] — the broader field AT is being absorbed into, mostly because the cognitive skills and the methodological practices overlap even when the vocabularies don't.

[[The paradox of foresight]] — both observations circle why anticipation is structurally difficult. Those who engage readily with foresight may already have anticipatory thinking as an individual practice. Those who resist it often lack both.

## Sitemap

- [Notes Index](https://garden.johanneskleske.com/notes-index)
- [Futures Terminology](https://garden.johanneskleske.com/futures-terminology.md)
- [Sitemap](https://garden.johanneskleske.com/sitemap.md)