The Epiphany Effect: How Future Casting Ignites Category Leadership

‍Have you ever had that moment? That instant when confusion transforms into crystal clarity?

One second, you’re swimming in ambiguity. The next, boom—a cascade of insight fires in your brain. You feel it physically. There’s a jolt, a lightness, maybe even a little awe. You’ve just leveled up.

These moments aren’t just cognitive perks—they’re chemically real. When we experience an epiphany, our brains release dopamine, the same neurotransmitter that floods us with pleasure and reinforces learning. In that instant, we don’t just know something new—we become someone new who knows it.

As Dr. John Kounios, co-author of The Eureka Factor, explains: ”An epiphany feels like a mental light bulb, but it’s more like a network-wide system reboot. In that moment, multiple brain regions—particularly the right anterior superior temporal gyrus—synchronize in a burst of gamma activity. It’s insight you can feel.”

David Rock, author of Your Brain at Work, adds:
“The moment of insight is one of the most powerful experiences in the human mind. It creates a neural ‘binding’ that literally rewires your brain.”

In the context of business—particularly B2B tech—these moments can be transformative. Especially when a brand delivers that epiphany to its audience.That’s what future casting makes possible. These are the kinds of moments that don’t just shift a perspective. They recode belief systems. And in business, they create customers who believe—not just buy.

Why Epiphanies Matter for Business

‍Let’s make it plain: category creation lives or dies in the mind of the buyer.

No one gives you permission to lead a new category. You earn it—by helping your audience see the world differently.

You don’t convince them with specs. You ignite an epiphany that reshapes how they understand the problem you solve and the future you're building.

That’s the magic of future casting.

What is Future Casting?

‍Future casting is the practice of visualizing—and then storytelling—the future of your industry, your company, and your customer’s world in a way that feels both inspiring and inevitable.

It’s where imagination meets strategy.

It sits in the same family as design fiction, strategic foresight, and even a touch of science fiction, but here’s the critical difference:

Future casting isn’t entertainment, it’s an invitation.

It’s the art of showing your audience not just what’s possible someday—but what’s achievable by putting the right technologies and strategies to work today.

It answers the deeper, more urgent question in your buyer’s mind:
“How do we get from where we are to where we need to be?”

Future casting builds that bridge.

It connects the promise of tomorrow to the actions of today, giving your audience a visceral, tangible view of the future that their choices—specifically, the choice to work with you—can unlock.

It turns the future from an abstract idea into an actionable agenda.

By implementing the right technologies and making strategic moves today, your audience sees exactly how they can accelerate toward that better tomorrow—with you leading the way.

It’s not wild guessing. It’s disciplined creativity. It’s the business case for transformation, made visible.

When done right, future casting doesn’t feel like marketing—it feels like revelation.

It creates epiphanies that pull customers forward, helping them see a future they didn’t even realize they wanted, until you showed them.

And better yet: it shows them exactly how to start building it now.

Epiphany Engineering: Why This Works

‍If future casting shows your audience the path forward, epiphany engineering is what makes them want to walk it.

Future casting isn’t prediction. It’s permission.

It’s a story-driven strategy with just enough foresight to spark possibility, yet just enough reality to stay grounded.

In a market flooded with parity products, where features and benefits blur together, buyers aren’t just comparing specs—they’re searching for clarity. They want to understand how their future changes with you in it. Most companies miss this moment, burying potential under technical specs and disconnected messaging.

Future casting is the antidote.

It’s the moment your customer stops seeing your product as “another tool” and starts seeing you as the only company that truly understands where they need to go next.

It illuminates not just what’s ahead, but how today’s decisions create momentum toward that future. It shows them the roadmap from uncertainty to inevitability—and how taking action now accelerates the journey.

When done well, future casting delivers what I call category epiphanies—those sudden flashes when someone realizes:
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• The problem they didn’t know they had
• The future they didn’t realize was possible
• Why only you can take them there

“Ohhh… this isn’t just a product I need. This is the lens I’ve been missing.”

And when that happens, you’re no longer one of many—you’re the one.

Category credibility isn’t built by claiming you’re different. It’s built by creating an epiphany in your audience that you see the future differently—and that they want in.

‍When I Discovered the Power of Future Casting: The Corning Story

‍I’ll be honest—I didn’t fully understand what we were creating at the time.

In 2011, I was working with Corning on what seemed like a straightforward, if challenging, brief: How do you make glass exciting?

Not just any glass—advanced technical glass. It had incredible properties, but the default playbook would have been to rattle off specifications and hope someone cared.

Instead, we took a different approach. We told a story.
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We created “A Day Made of Glass”—a visual journey into a near-future world where glass wasn’t just material, but transformative. Transparent interfaces. Smart surfaces. Adaptive environments. The stuff of sci-fi, grounded in science.

The video went viral. But that wasn’t the point.

What mattered was the shift it created. In just a few minutes, Corning transformed from a materials company into architects of the future.

Harvard Business Review later called it “a powerful demonstration of how companies can use visualization to bring breakthrough technologies to life.”

Looking back, I realize: we weren’t selling glass. We were selling a future—and Corning’s place at its center.

I didn’t have a name for it then, but this was future casting in action.

‍SAP Concur: Redefining a Category from the Inside Out

‍By the time we began working with SAP Concur, our team had been refining the practice of Future casting for over a decade.

Between Corning and Concur, we had helped craft future visions for GE Digital, Cisco, Omnicell, Blackberry, and many others—shaping stories that turned abstract technology roadmaps into clear, customer-first narratives of transformation.

Each project sharpened the approach. Each one taught me that Future casting isn’t a tactic—it’s a discipline.

So when SAP Concur came to us, they weren’t just asking for a strategy or campaign. Here was a company known for expense management, suddenly facing an identity challenge after being acquired by SAP.

They came to us with a real existential challenge: How do we evolve without losing what makes us different?

Together, we future-cast a world where travel and expenses practically manage themselves.

Through collaborative vision workshops, we crafted a north star vision that aligned their future with SAP’s larger enterprise goals, while still keeping the rebellious spark that made Concur special.

Then we built the technology map and technology arc—visual blueprints that showed how today’s innovations could evolve into the seamless future we imagined.

The result?

A unified story that made engineers dream, stakeholders align, and customers believe. One that positioned SAP Concur not just as a product provider, but as the definitive force shaping the future of expense management.
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‍Why This Works: Future Casting as Category Creation

‍At its core, Future casting is an act of category design.

It positions your company not within a category—but as the definer of a new one.

In the words of Category Pirates:
“Great brands force a choice of category, not a comparison in a category.”

Future casting activates the magic triangle:
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• Product design: Grounding vision in capabilities
• Company design: Aligning culture and roadmap around that vision
• Category design: Making your future the future in the minds of customers

And the fastest way to do that? Create content that triggers epiphanies.

‍Next Up: How to Do It

‍In the next blog, I’ll walk through the frameworks we use to help clients bring these stories to life:

• Back casting
• Technology mapping
• Design fiction
• Roadmap storytelling
• Metrics that matter

We’ll explore how to future-cast responsibly—with one eye on imagination and the other on implementation.

Because the best way to predict the future isn’t to guess. It’s to design it—and tell a story so clear, your audience feels like they’re already living it.