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I interrupt my mini-series on Gen Beta for this special weather announcement.

If you lived anywhere east of the Rocky Mountains in the United States this past week, you inevitably found yourself under intense snow and ice warnings. More than 12,000 flights were cancelled, and over 200 million people were placed under some form of severe winter weather alert (NBC News, 2026).

The cold snap got me thinking.

There’s a striking similarity between meteorologists and futurists. And for leaders, there’s something important we can glean from that parallel.

It all started about a week ago.

The internet was spewing alerts of imminent heavy winter weather. Local meteorologists here in North Carolina were forecasting as much as 29 inches of snow. Those conversations morphed as quickly as the amoeba-like radar images behind them. Forecasts shifted from feet of snow, to no snow at all, then to devastating inches of ice.

Every day we tuned in, waiting to hear what would be falling from the sky and eventually accumulating on the ground. The asinine part of it all was that we were relying on those predictions as gospel truth to make our plans.

The media forecasts caused mass hysteria. Images of empty shelves began flooding news feeds.

Panic buying followed. Bread, milk, and eggs disappeared almost instantly. Sparse shelves triggered additional fear in hurried shoppers, causing others to buy even more. These highly perishable foods have oddly become “essentials,” a tradition dating back to the Great Blizzard of 1978, despite their high likelihood of spoiling (AccuWeather, 2024). What began as a rational response decades ago has now become ritualized panic.

As behavioral economist Daniel Ariely famously argued in Predictably Irrational, humans are remarkably consistent in their inconsistency.

So the question isn’t whether people panic. The real question is: why?

At its core, panic buying isn’t about preparedness. It’s about fear, uncertainty, and the loss of perceived control. As behavioral finance professor Hersh Shefrin explains, “there’s a difference between emergency preparedness and panic buying,” and once fear takes over, people fixate on worst-case scenarios. Yale’s Ravi Dhar adds that when people feel uncertain, “the risk of running out feels worse than overspending,” pushing them to act irrationally.

Psychologists note that panic buying often stems from a need to regain control over the uncontrollable, paired with a herd mentality, where seeing others stock up triggers more of the same. In other words, when those delivering information speak with authority but emphasize worst-case scenarios, fear spreads faster than facts, and scarcity becomes contagious.

Which brings us back to leadership.

Here’s where leaders sometimes offer a harmful forecast.

In moments of uncertainty, leaders can unintentionally behave like storm forecasters. They announce disruption early, emphasize worst-case scenarios, and assume that more advanced warning automatically equals better preparation. They describe what is going to change:

But just like weather forecasts, describing the “what” without vision and purpose creates confusion, not clarity. What’s the functional difference between one inch of ice and twenty-four inches of snow? The number alone doesn’t tell you how to prepare. What matters is the implication. How does that precipitation affect roads, power, safety, and daily life?

Change works the same way.

Change without vision creates fear. Fear drives irrational behavior. And irrational behavior destabilizes teams and organizations.

As Erica Ariel Fox, author of Winning from Within, explains, when uncertainty is communicated without rationale and direction, people don’t fill the silence with logic, they fill it with fear. Our brains are wired to detect threats before opportunities. When leaders focus on what is changing without explaining why it matters, they unintentionally activate that survival instinct.

I’ve seen this play out recently with a leader of a large, legacy organization preparing for sweeping operational change. New structures. New language. New processes. When they walked me through the announcement, everything centered on what would be different.

Predictably, the same questions would surface in the minds of stakeholders almost immediately: What does this mean for me? Am I safe/unimpacted? Do I still belong here?

The change itself wasn’t reckless. In fact, it was thoughtful, necessary, and backed by years of research, board deliberation, and market insight. In time, it will be good for the organization and its stakeholders. But it was delivered like a winter weather forecast, what and how….lots of data, lots of detail, very little meaning.

The result wasn’t alignment. It was panic. People disengaged. Some left. Not because the strategy was wrong, but because the story was incomplete.

So, what do futurists, meteorologists, and leaders actually have in common?

More than one might think.

Meteorologists don’t guess. They analyze. They study historical patterns, pressure systems, cloud formations, and data models built over decades. They send weather balloons into layers of the atmosphere most of us never think about. They look at what’s happening above the surface to better understand what’s likely to happen next.

As a layperson, I don’t even begin to understand most of it. But I trust that it’s grounded in history, data, and pattern recognition, not theatrics.

That description isn’t too far off from what a good futurist does.

People often ask what work is like as a futurist, and my answer is usually simple: “I don’t have a crystal ball. I don’t even know what’s for dinner.” And somehow, despite no one ever laughing at that joke, I keep repeating it, expecting a different result. I guess that passes Einstein’s litmus test for insanity. 

Anyway, the reality is, a futurist doesn’t exist to predict your future or the future of your company. A futurist exists to help you understand the forces shaping it.

That starts with people.

A good futurist studies human behavior over time, not just emerging tools or trends. They understand where people have been, how people react, what their real concerns will be, and how to lead them forward. 

They’re less interested in jumping on the latest trend and more interested in why change happens in the first place. They connect past patterns to future outcomes and use framework as a lens to see how culture and society and people impact decisions. 

At the same time, a futurist is comfortable saying, “We don’t know yet,” while still helping leaders think clearly about what matters, what’s likely, and what’s worth watching.

That’s where leadership comes in.

Many of the best leaders I know are futurists, even if they’ve never used the title. They didn’t get where they are by accident. They’re exceptional at pattern recognition. They understand culture, psychology, incentives, and fear. They don’t just study change, they’ve lived it. And those lived experiences are often what separate outstanding leaders and futurists from everyone else.

And here’s the key distinction that distinguishes leaders and futurists from meteorologists: good futurists and good leaders don’t incite panic.

They have a healthy pulse on emerging culture. They track trends. They pay attention to what’s coming next. But they don’t chase every shiny object or declare every shift an emergency. Awareness doesn’t cause them to sound the alarm. They aren’t overly reactive. They also aren’t passive, thinking everything is a trend or fad that will soon pass.

Instead, they focus on second- and third-order effects. They care less about the trending viral video or the most talked about headlines and more about downstream consequences. Their goal isn’t to impress people with predictions, it’s to help them prepare reasonably. And if you look at their track records, the best futurists tend to do well not because they’re louder or more certain, but because they build clarity, confidence, and the ability to make decisions even when the future isn’t fully visible.

There was a moment recently that stuck with me.

Recently, Dr. Connie Book, the president of Elon University, said something simple but unexpectedly meaningful to me during a podcast interview: “Ryan is calm. I’ve always appreciated your demeanor and your approach with people.”

At the time, I thanked her and moved on. But later, I realized that might be one of the best compliments a futurist, or a leader, can receive.

Calm doesn’t mean passive. It doesn’t mean disengaged. It means grounded. It means having seen enough cycles, enough change, enough uncertainty to know that panic rarely produces clarity. That steadiness doesn’t come from a crystal ball. It comes from lived experience. It comes from watching patterns repeat, seeing fear rise and fall, and learning when to speak, when to wait, and how to help people think instead of react. And it comes from a tactful “approach with people. And that, more than any prediction, is what good futurists, and good leaders, actually offer.

That’s the real.

Not forecasting storms, but helping people understand what they’re walking into, how to think about it, and how to move forward without panic.