A quick tour of Linked, Facebook or Twitter in 2021 will reveal a flood of articles, webinars and conferences on how to think about the future in an intentional and actionable way. If the COVID-19 pandemic impacted nothing else — and it most certainly did — it definitely created a greater urgency around the uncertain future of, well, everything. The future of work? It will be completely virtual, OR an excited return to f2f interaction, OR a hybrid model, OR maybe we will throw off the shackles of uninspired labor and redefine work as a full-time actualization of our passions. What about the future of cities? Well they will be technologically smart, OR reconnected to nature, OR higher order expressions of a post-human emergence, OR even greater drains on planetary resources? The future of the web? It will be an extension of self, OR a criminal haven, OR a depersonalized data drain, OR an embodiment of abundance, OR a wasteland of non-fungible scarcity, or… or… or… You get the idea.
Though futures and foresight skills have actually always been important for governments, organizations, communities and individual lives, we have historically tended to relegate those skills to a once-a-year check-up, momentarily gauging the health of our more traditional planning methods through a bit of lite trend analysis while simultaneously applauding those long-standing metrics of linear value and success. Then along came a deadly global virus that utterly shook our economies, policies, businesses, and every one of those traditional metrics to the core. Now, talking about futures thinking as a normal human skill to help us navigate an unknown terrain is all the rage. Surely, foresight can help us navigate these new obstacles and restore our pre-pandemic operating system? Alas, the pandemic may have amplified humanity’s need to normalize the exploration of uncertainty and complexity, but it also laid bare our inability to use futures thinking as a tool to mastery over those elements. A shifting world not only beckons us to alter our perspective; it also has the power to reframe our role in a naturally maturing cosmos.
Now don’t get us wrong — we should all be grateful that more and more people are recognizing the need for futuring as a normal human activity. However, it’s also important to note that futures thinking has been around for quite awhile, and both the theory and practice of the field are more extensive than many realize. In offering that statement, we’re by no means saying that new voices aren’t needed in the field. They absolutely are, and those diverse views enrich the scope, scale and even meaning of futures thinking, especially in terms of including those unrecognized visions of the future that have been hidden and silenced by dominant cultural narratives and practices. Further, we’re not saying that new approaches aren’t needed in the field. Any living practice should evolve and transform, and many times this only happens when new perspectives are made to feel at-home in the laboratory of exploration. Besides, foresight works best when we democratize the future, decentralizing this way of thinking and acting across humanity.
Why then did we bring up the established nature of the field? As professionals who have 30+ years of combined practice in all aspects of foresight — and who work hard to remain open to continually learning and changing ourselves — we want to address the evolutionary development of futures thinking that’s been underway for decades, long before its pandemic-activated role as a social media influencer that comfortably knows its way around Instagram. In doing so, we hope to offer a better understanding of the power of foresight to take us beyond the antiquated practices of strategic planning, SWOT analyses or developing long-range developmental goals. If our suggestion that foresight isn’t simply a booster shot for those traditional models sounds unfamiliar to you or challenges your view of the practice, then I hope you will seriously consider what we might call the “Foresight Ladder.” Each rung demonstrates the evolutionary application of futures thinking on our collective relationship with a world that seems more uncertain every day.
1. Futures Proof
The phrase “futures proof” was a staple in the field of foresight long before COVID-19 disrupted everyone’s lives, but the pandemic has made it a pervasive battle-cry among organizations and governments. The idea is to utilize foresight as a risk management and environmental design tool, supporting our efforts to centralize, quantify, predict and mollify the future. “When will the next world-changing event occur? How can we stop prevent change from disrupting our way of life? How can we manage the uncertainty ahead so that we can stay the course?” This is strategy’s attempt to domesticate foresight, employing it as a means to safeguard the status quo in the face of an unfamiliar world. The problem with this framing is that a new landscape requires a new way of measuring. Beyond being a passive approach that sees the future as something happening to us that we should be frightened of, it suggests that we live in a universe of logical certainty. If our current experiences have taught us anything, it should be that certainty is not a characteristic of the future.
2. Futures Ready
“How can we make sure that we have what it takes to weather the approaching storm? Are we poised to take advantage of the mega trends in business and society? Are we best positioned to seize on the promising opportunities that align with our strengths while navigating past the threats that could prey on our weaknesses? Are we future fit?” These questions should sound very familiar as they are uttered repeatedly by every organizational and governmental foresight effort. However, this focus is one that looks at the world from the “inside-out” (IO) instead of the “outside-in.” (OI) An IO perspective sees foresight as a way to measure an institution’s well-worn area of focus (“What’s keeping the leadership awake at night?”), and secure the present operating system for the long-haul. This is what might known as the “push of the future” or defining foresight as an exercise in intentionally managing the trends and emerging issues that are pushing us into the future whether we like it or not. From this vantage point, the future is filtered through our dominant narratives, and only the strong, fit and ready among us will survive and thrive.
3. Futures Empowered
This rung of the Foresight Ladder envelops the entire spectrum of the future, from “push” to “pull,” but flips our attention from an IO to an OI perspective. This reoriented locus moves us away from a primary goal of attempting to ensure long-term entrenchment and success for the dominant narratives within our organizations, governments and societies, and reframes foresight as an organic mindset and practice. When we look at the world from a much broader, holistic, and integrated vista, we begin to expose the assumptions, biases, shortcomings, immaturities, gaps and flaws in our systems that must naturally transform in order to be relevant and generative. This empowerment — a manifestation of embodying the currently popular concept of futures literacy — shifts us from being framers to imaginers, innovators to inventors, commanders to collaborators, sustainers to regenerators, separators to entanglers, colonizers to democratizers, and fearful cynics to awe-inspired visionaries. Many who are invested in “the way things have always been” may hope to stop at the Future Ready rung of the ladder, but that’s not how futures thinking works. Foresight isn’t an add-on that serves to supercharge our traditional methods of business, governance or civilizational development; by its very nature, it challenges the efficacy and existence of all that we think and do. The Futures Empowered have ventured beyond the reductive idea of employing trend analyses for making the best strategic decisions, realizing that a world of ever-increasing uncertainty and ambiguity redefines the “what, why and so what” of life as we’ve known it. (For more on how we must embrace complexity for greater opportunities, read A Superhero Named Complexity)
4. Futures Consciousness
If being Futures Empowered fosters new ways of thinking about the future (as well as the past and present) in order to overcome wicked problems and cultivate unique opportunities, Futures Consciousness fosters new ways of collective BEING that allow humanity to perceive and align with emerging realities so as to participate in the evolutionary co-creative process. This rung of the Foresight Ladder moves us past the idea that the future is a time to prepare for or a place to aspire to, but rather an experience that we can manifest. This is a state of revelatory sense-making, recognition of novelty and the unfolding of higher order purpose. When we begin observing the cosmos through the eyes of cooperative creative complexity rather than seeing it as chaos that we must order (or, as some might believe, peacefully surrender to), we shift from being ready for, fighting against, or gaining control over what’s to come, to giving birth to the unique and undiscovered nature of the future. Futures Consciousness (also known as Holoptic Foresight; see Holoptic Foresight Dynamics: An Evolutionary Model for Co-Creating the Future) posits a change in our cosmological narrative from being ‘separate but connected’ to ‘the whole as a unique entity,’ allowing for a greater capability to display anticipatory behavior. More than a collective skill, Futures Consciousness tracks along the evolutionary arrow from competition to cooperation, ultimately becoming a human trait and cosmo-centric force. Once we reach this step in our futures journey, we’ll understand that foresight is much more than an important skill to learn and leverage; it’s a critical element in continuing the human story.
I hope this brief explanation of how foresight can take us far beyond preparing for the next crisis or predicting the next fortune will inspire you to bravely journey into the unknown, and to take as many with you as possible.
