Mercifully we are not all required to predict President Trump’s next pivot. Some people must try to forecast the consequences of it. Doing so is driving the oil traders nuts, and making quite a few of them rich. Mentoring increasingly has to do with looking ahead. That means being able to forecast, a tricky business and one you can’t get right all the time. So you must do it skilfully and prudently. If you don’t do it at all you will fall behind.
Fundamental to forecasting is reading people better. That also involves reading our own changing personalities more accurately if we are to learn at the speed today’s world demands. The crucial skill of reading people is best taught by vigorous, context-written roleplays. They bring vividly close real life experiences and challenging situations. They require courage, the primary quality for a Mentee – and for a Mentor.
Astute Mentors learn from their Mentees. The latest management fad may not be lasting but it is forceful while it is around. Being able to forecast beyond it, to anticipate the next ‘pivot’ and line up the mental tools needed to farm it is how good managers maintain control with few rules and common sense behaviour. Management is about mapping before marching. A Mentee who maps well is already a leader. You can learn that the hard way, too.
Today’s educational systems focus on understanding intake. We need to be able to do that somewhat less than previously since we have AI. Now we must engage both with AI and with other people. We are losing our ability to do that. Re-engagement is a basic tool of the developing scene.
AI is imitating thoughts better than most of the people you deal with. It is forecasting and deciding beyond the learnt process of thinking. To know where you are going is good. To decide which route you will take is management. Good management knows its role strategically as well as tactically and, even more importantly, when it is doing which.
“The Tree on the other side of the Field”, an analogy for Purpose, was always key to success. Without it ‘career ploughing’ is tangled and mangled. Even with it there will be enough opportunities and hazards to require refocus and perseverance. These two demands are contradictory. Steering between them needs a steady hand and a penchant for forecasting. Which is why a good Mentor will regard this as one of his or her key efforts.
Intelligently, humans do no more work than they have to. At least, it seemed intelligent up to now. A couple of former QCs who became hill farmers in Scotland revealed that their true happiness was exhaustion from physical work. I know the feeling, having been a farmer myself. Today’s farming for most people is thinking. It, too, requires considerable effort. AI does some of the nudging for you but it only helps if you regard it as a challenge to be beaten by your own, more creative, thoughts. Today’s mentoring enables Mentees to think faster and judge the risks of doing so more precisely.
One of today’s tough challenges is the allocation of time. The smartphone brought us speed and a misguided belief that it is all that matters. Of course speed matters – both speeds. We remember them when we think fast will score points, as it sometimes does. We forget them when the message is ‘slow down and think’. In fact we don’t even hear that message most of the time. Deeper thinking is the by-product requirement of AI and the technological progress the world is making. Read Farida Khalef’s excellent article on Darwin’s use of time.
The most critical of today’s Mentees’ needs is confidence. Not the confidence of being right but the confidence of being curious. The future belongs to the interested.
‘Not interested’ puts out the light on the most exciting time in history.
Mentors fan the flame.
Good morning
John Bittleston
Do you have an experience of mentoring you’d like to share? Please send it to [email protected].
29 May 2026
