The Illustrated Futurist : The Walk, the Work, and the Will

Demystifying and Re-mystifying the Role of the Futurist in the Era of the Metacrisis

This wasn’t my original choice for a representative picture for this article. My first choice was of someone walking out of the fog, into the sun, and back into another patch of fog — a metaphor for the work of a seasoned Futurist. However, I couldn’t pull myself away from this picture instead — two children running headlong across a bridge into the foggy unknown without even hesitating. I loved the aspect of “emergent play” as an important part of the Futurist’s walk, work, and will. One child wearing a multi-colored dress (the Futurist clothed in multiple futures) is holding the other child’s hand (the eager explorer unlocking their innate biological, psychological, and sacred Futures Thinker), supportively guiding them into the fog. The bridge they are crossing represents the transformational pull into the Event Horizon, Threshold Event, or an emerging irruption of potential states that break forth and burst into our reality — a holistic picture much different from that of the Futurist and Futures Thinker as one who futilely attempts to measure, quantify, and forecast a future that avoids the fog altogether.

In the era of accelerating complexity that is exacerbating the collapse of antiquated systems that many are now calling the Metacrisis, the Futurist — a function that highlights the social, technological, economic, environmental, and political changes on the horizon — is faced with as much of an identity crisis as any other discipline in existence today.

Long before I decide to write any article, I keep a running list of potential ideas, short descriptions, and possible titles in different places: as drafts on Medium, in a document on my computer, and in my personal notebook. When it’s time to put pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard), I’ll go back to my list. Some of the titles no longer hold as much meaning or urgency as they did when I first conjured them. Others have matured over time, gaining greater depth and substance, and it’s from these titles that I simply need to pick the one that is the most meaningful and pressing at the present moment. I share this because the article in front of you — one that had been incubating and fermenting for quite awhile — would not have made the cut if I had checked the list one day earlier. Nevertheless, I saw an interesting post on social media recently addressing the popular perception of the role, work, and value of the Futurist in today’s world. That particular post promoted the idea that the work of the Futurist primarily revolves around quantitative modeling and running simulations, so here we are.

In this short article, I only scratch the surface of demystifying the Futurist (i.e. reconstituting the Futurist from their now many disconnected and disparate expressions, ones often forcefully defined by landscapes in which they were subsequently designed), and re-mystifying the Futurist (i.e. restoring and regenerating the “walk” or discipline of the Futurist, the “work” or tasks and activity of the Futurist, and the “will” or deep purpose of the Futurist beyond the obsolescent structures that define the modern world). This is not an article addressing whether the use of the word “futurist” as a moniker for those that are connected in any capacity to the field of Foresight & Futures Thinking (as I will refer to the field throughout) is an appropriate descriptor, and so purposefully but adjacently leans into the reclamation of the term as a means to holistically embody the depth and breadth of the “why” and “what” of the Futurist. (I purposefully leave out the “how” and the “who” of the Futurist, and will briefly explain why at the end of the article.)

To begin, let me briefly explain why I titled this article “The Illustrated Futurist,” as this will set the stage for the de- and re-mystification of the role. At this point, I’m sure that most are aware that I’ve borrowed this title from the famed Science Fiction author Ray Bradbury’s 1951 compilation of short stories called The Illustrated Man. The stories that make up the book are unrelated, except for the fact that they are tied together by a prologue about a vagrant who had received a body full of tattoos from a time-traveling woman, each tattoo coming to life to tell a story about the future — even the future of people came in contact with him. Of course, the Futurist is well known for crafting alternative stories and visions about the future, “illustrations” as it were that are meant to pull from the future to inspire action, strategy, innovation, and transformation in the present. In this sense, Bradbury’s character is a metaphor for the Futurist, embodying the beauty and dread of unfolding possibilities. The fact that the theme of The Illustrated Man is also a demonstration of the power of creative imagination makes this a very fitting comparison indeed, and definitely lends itself to better defining the role of the Futurist.

In 2012, foresight researcher and educator Wendy Schultz wrote a short but impactful chapter for the book The Future of Futures entitled The History of the Future which included what she called the “Five Waves of Futures.” These five waves are meant to represent five generalized eras within the field of Foresight & Futures Thinking, each era being characterized by a distinct way of sensing and acting upon the future.

First Wave: Oral Tradition (examples include shamans, mystics, priests, and others)

Second Wave: Early Written Age (examples include Sīma Qiān, Ibn Khaldun, Nostradamus, Thomas More, Robert Boyle)

Third Wave: Extraction and Enlightenment (examples include de Condorcet, Comte, H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, William F. Ogburn, Soviet planning)

Fourth Wave: Systems and Cybernetics (examples include RAND, SRI, la prospective, Herman Khan, Shell, GBN, The Limits to Growth)

Fifth Wave: Complexity and Emergence (examples include Integral Futures, CLA, experiential futures, anticipatory systems)

I’ve purposefully created a demarcation between the fourth and fifth waves to indicate that the latter is still in its early stages, and this explains why many continue to advocate for quantified-measurement forecasting as an equivalency for futures thinking/futuring. This fifth wave of complexity and emergence is not only a response to the over-emphasis and hyper-dependence on “quantified futures” in the form of hard numbers, systems dynamics, and mechanical pathways to forecasting and prediction, but is also indicative of a growing recognition of the biological, psychological, and sacred elements of expanded Foresight & Futures Thinking, especially in the face of what many have called a growing “polycrisis” or “metacrisis” across the globe. More accurately, it’s a growing recognition of what might be deemed futures consciousness as an expansion of our deep cosmic connection and evolutionary transformation. As Wendy also noted in her chapter, quoting Eleonora Masini, “People become human the moment they think about the future, the moment they try to plan for the future.” In this sense — an understanding that comes from a deep dive into this way of sensing and acting upon the world — thinking about the future is a profoundly intrinsic feature of all life rather than another tool to help us reach “success” within our present systems. (For an even better understanding of how our present “metacrisis” leads us into broad-based transformational change, read Jonathan Rowson’s article Prefixing the World. I also highly encourage you to watch Katie Teague’s video featuring Rowson sharing insights around “Living in the Metacrisis,” either before reading the rest of this article, or bookmark it to watch after you finish reading — just do yourself a favor and watch the video for a better understanding of the present imperative around the walk, work, and will of the Futurist. As Katie said in a post in which she introduced this video,

“Jonathan gives a lucid 50,000' view on our experience of ‘living in the metacrisis’ as a defining feature of our inheritance as Earthlings at this historical time. Could we really be living through a new axial ‘moment?’ [moment in this instance = 100’s of years] I find this narrative intuitively, viscerally plausible and experientially more convincing than the notion ‘that we can muddle through our predicament with the existing frameworks’ (paraphrasing JR from the film). I also experience this story as vastly more liberating to my sense of agency and more beautiful, more generative to my imagination, two key ingredients to living through the metacrisis in a good way IMO.”

Now we are at the crux of what defines the illustrated Futurist - the bearer of many-storied future that is alive and moving and transforming in the way that we see our species, our actions, our world, and our cosmos. (This in contrast to the stories that lean heavily on the probability and plausibility of the dominant systems, structures, and solutions that exist to infuse stability. To paraphrase the writer, poet, and mythic philosopher Sophie Strand, any entity that seeks stability — a strange desire and fascination of our industrial age — is already dying or dead, as stability breeds stagnation, and stagnation is death. All living things move and transform, and this is another aspect of the challenge to the role of the Futurist.) In an attempt to better understand these realities, and to make sense of it all, we have transitioned from eras of spiritual mysticism that sought a knowledge inaccessible to the intellect, to eras of individual agency and control over every aspect of existence. We gained increased intelligence through science and technology, but in exchange we have been dispossessed of deep meaning, ancestral purpose, and generational connection. Schultz’s five waves aren’t just eras that relate to the practice of the Futurist; they are larger landscapes of the human story that then influence how we frame the role of the Futurist.*

• Wave 1: The Futurist as the Intermediary (i.e. the prophet, the mouthpiece)
• Wave 2: The Futurist as the Revelator (i.e. the teacher of deep wisdom and insights)
• Wave 3: The Futurist as the Philosopher (i.e the voice of reason, the scientist)
• Wave 4: The Futurist as the Strategist/Technologist (i.e. planning, quantifying, mechanizing)

This brings us to our current and emerging expression of the Futurist, the illustrated human that carries many different stories and expressions of past eras (as well as stories of eras yet-to-be). What is the discipline, the activity, and the purpose of the Futurist at the beginning of the 21st Century? What roles and characteristics do we need to include from the previous eras as we grapple with our interconnected metacrisis, and what roles and characteristics no longer serve us from the Futurist as intermediary, revelator, philosopher, and strategist/technologist (and, of course, maybe never did)?

How Do We Define the Fifth Wave “Illustrated Futurist?”

I opened this article with a picture (see above) that I feel nicely illustrates the evolving and emerging walk (discipline or field), work (activity), and will (purpose) of the Futurist in the era of the Metacrisis. It also illustrates the power and importance of referring to this emerging expression as the “Illustrated Futurist.” As in Bradbury’s story, the word “illustrated” conveys a dual meaning. Yes, the main character in this story was tattooed from head-to-toe with the “Skin Illustrations” — living stories that symbolize the power of imagination — but the word “illustrate” also denotes the ability to serve as an example. What this means for today’s Illustrated Futurist (the Fifth Wave Futurist in accordance with Schultz’s timeline) is the need to think and act in service to ancestors, generations, a living cosmo-vision that transcends the trivialities of a planetary culture obsessed with extracting, monetizing, consuming, and devouring. As biologist and systems thinker Phoebe Tickell declared, “I am really interested in the idea of imagination activists, that is a form of activism which is just a very powerful force of imagining that things could be different, and that we could choose who we want to be and what kind of life you want to lead for the direction that we as a human species need to go in this next decade… This next decade is crucial — cultivating the kind of courage to do what you believe is right... I think that that is really important! I don’t think we should shy away from that; the kind of decisions we’re going to have to make in this next 10 years, often they’re going to seem totally bonkers in the decisions that will actually change things.” The picture, like the Illustrated Futurist, acts as a story of Tickell’s imagination activism for a world in need of being challenged, embracing change, and expressing courage.

In the picture, two children appear to be running across a bridge into a patch of fog that hides what is on the other side. One of the children (the girl) is holding the hand and seems to be guiding the other child (the boy) into the fog without hesitation. This is an excellent analogy of the bio/psycho/sacred tenor, mood, and atmosphere of the Fifth Wave Futurist (I’m using this term only for the sake of the references and arguments presented in this article, and not as a new title to be adopted by anyone.)

1. The “Futurist” is represented by the female, a designation that is most often aligned with the traits of intuition (which is also strongly connected to sense-making, abductive mental mapping, and the innate capabilities of foresight), nurturing and transformation (as the twins of evolutionary development), cooperation and collaboration (working and acting together for common and mutual benefit), creativity (regenerative sight and outcomes), living systems (life force energy as the matrix of the emergent), being (unearthing the process and nature of life), and even the ability to openly face the dark of the unknown rather than needing to delineate a concrete answer before exploring new possibilities (embracing the powerful cycles of death and rebirth).
2. The “Futures Thinker” is represented by the male that traditionally hosts characteristics of knowing (epistemology over ontology), logic, rationality, analytical approaches, hyper-quantification, and action-orientation. These characteristics have been the hallmarks of our current patriarchal systems that has defined our models of organizations, governments, and social constructs. These characteristics have their place in Foresight & Futures Thinking, but we must be cautious about leading with them. Previous eras have obviously been based upon these characteristics, and the shift toward an era of complexity and emergence is partially a reaction to the failure of such a foundation to elevate life and prevent what we now call a polycrisis or metacrisis. (Daniel Schmachtenberger spoke several years ago about the need for leading with wisdom over knowledge, and it’s no mistake that the former is the domain of the feminine spirit as well.) To be clear, I am not saying that only those deemed as “Professional Futurists” have the former traits, while those who practice “everyday foresight” without activating a 24/7 role as a Futurist have the latter. Rather, I’m alluding to the idea that the Futurist as a role is stepping into a much different way of thinking, knowing, sensing, feeling, and intuiting than society has recognize up to now, and that futures thinking broadly unlocked and integrated throughout society is led into deep visioning by the former before defining and applying the latter.
3. The fog in the illustration represents the future(s), the “unknown unknowns,” the multi-faceted ways of seeing and knowing, the beautiful uncertainty that reframes our modern approaches to life. The Futurist doesn’t run from the fog, shield others from the fog, or attempt to eliminate the fog. Rather, the fog is the friend of the Futurist, and in an era of complexity and emergence the fog is seen as the norm — a stark contrast to the systemic and cybernetic approaches that have given us our linear, mechanistic, and disconnected world.
4. Lastly, the bridge is more than a crossing from one state of existence to another, or from the present into the future. Here, the bridge represents an event horizon or threshold event that causes previous potential states on the fringe to emerge into the world (or what Bonnitta Roy calls the “processes of irruption (that) can be likened to the phenomenon of a lake turning over, where the deeper, colder layers rise up as the surface layers begin to cool). Our previous concept of the future being “incrementally exponential” is giving way in this new era to the future as “transitionally transformative.” This differentiation focuses us more on the emerging processes that challenge previous “stable state” ways of life rather than on the object-orientation of trends that slowly build their way into the mainstream via social saturation. (Side note: trends often represent the ideas and objects that our system of capital and consumption have created to reinforce itself. In other words, who is creating a “trend,” who is it serving, and what future story does it derive from? Would different approaches to life — different ways of seeing and knowing — illuminate a different set of unfolding realities that we call “trends”?) Making sense of larger processes of change and “pre-emergent” qualities as“pathways of possibility previously unimagined” is the bridge of today’s Futurist.

Together, these descriptions paint a profound, dangerous, and contrarian picture of the Illustrated/Fifth Wave Futurist during the early part of the 21st Century and in the midst of the Metacrisis:

Wave 5: The Futurist as the Visionary and Imaginist

Some of the characteristics of The Futurist as the Visionary and Imaginist include:

• A voice of multi-perspectival alternative visions that challenges the dominant narrative of a limited and well-defined scope of reality. This descriptor will cause great angst for those who believe in data as savior or simplification as problem-solver, but many are already recognizing that humanity is entering a “great confusion” as the systems that we once believed to be “stable state” are being exposed as irretrievably broken, irreconcilable with the natural growth of complexity, and unfit for generational wellbeing. In the words of Jonathan Rowson (from the video linked above), “The metacrisis is something about our relationship to all of the crisis in the world, so it’s inherently reflexive… it acknowledges human interiority and relationality as a fundamental part of the problem… you can see it as a sign that modernity is ending… it’s because we’re in a ‘time between worlds’ that things don’t make sense, things begin to break down… intellectually we’re not up to it anymore, the intellectual function is not succeeding in making sense of the world, the world is eclipsing or going beyond our capacity to make sense of it and these are all signs that our existing form of consciousness is somehow in need of evolution - in need of growing in some way.” (For a better understanding of reframing our pathways of consciousness, see my e-book Embodying a Future That’s ALIVE.)
• A progenitor of futures consciousness — an ever-expanding awareness of cosmic possibilities — brought to life through anticipatory imagination. It has been said that the greatest human invention is the overarching achievement of the dissemination of knowledge, amplified over a period of time through devices such as the printing press, photography, motion pictures, and the Internet. Likewise, it has been inferred that the next great invention will be the dissemination of imagination. If we are to traverse the boundary between worlds, then imagination must be reclaimed from our hyper-efficiency and hyper-productivity mis-framing as being a fanciful activity that has little value in our everyday decisions and actions, to its rightful place as the creative power of forming mental images of ideas and capabilities that cannot be perceived by our physical senses or within the scope of our present reality. Phoebe Tickell refers to this expression as “Imagination Activism,” noting that such a characteristic “includes the need to imagine things differently, the need to expand who gets to imagine, and the need to go beyond the limits of traditional forms of activism that fight the old into imagining the new… In this way, (Imagination Activism) create(s) pockets of the future by bringing new possibilities into the present, while also expanding the Overton Window of what seems possible too. One could refer to them (Imagination Activists) as artists of the impossible… they believe a better world is possible, and they draw on the tools of creativity, inspiration and hope to resource their action to build that better world today.”
• A fog-seeker who is at home in the obscured and confusing — in the places where it is hard to see using the traditional maps and metrics, the ones that promise solutions through simplicity and constant clarity but in the end they ALWAYS fail. This stance certainly delineates the Illustrated Futurist (the Futurist as the Visionary and Imaginist/the Fifth Wave Futurist) from the increasingly obsolete Futurist as the Strategist and Technologist. As philosopher Jonathan Rowson shared in his take on leading from confusion, “With that metacrisis context in mind, today’s challenge is to keep asking the unanswerable questions, but also to reduce shame about confusion and begin to illustrate what it means to be skillfully confused. When Salvador Dali said ‘What is important is to spread confusion, not eliminate it’ I can’t be certain what he meant, and it might have had something to do with an unsuspecting rhinoceros or a melting clock, but I think he meant that confusion is where inspiration comes from. Einstein for instance said, ‘I used to go away for weeks in a state of confusion.’… while sensemaking looks like a social practice that responds to confusion, it has some risks and limitations too, because it is mostly about taking flight from dissonance and other discomforting feelings that often contain unexpected gems. As Bonnitta Roy might put it, it fails to realise that while ‘the signal’ is important, so is ‘the noise’, because the noise is where the latent potential is. We should not be too quick to associate sense with rightness, nor clarity with success. In light of the complexity of the world, there is a case for becoming more familiar with the experience of confusion, getting better at tolerating it, and even learning to love it.” (Leading from Confusion: https://perspecteeva.substack.com/p/leading-from-confusion?utm_source=%2Fbrowse%2Fphilosophy&utm_medium=reader2)
• A keysmith who aids individuals and communities in the unlocking of the biological, psychological, and sacred elements within the innate dynamic of foresight and futures thinking. This characteristic is a liberation from the view of the Futurist as the source of knowledge about what is appearing on the horizon, an aspect that was a common denominator across all previous eras or waves. Rather, the Illustrated Futurist acts as a shepherd or midwife for the opening of humanity’s natural, organic, and evolutionary connection with Foresight & Futures Thinking.
• A metaphorical dragonfly— the many-eyed sense-maker who pulls diverse surroundings and players into a multi-faceted and unique/novel “whole.” This “whole” is the integration of cooperative evolutionary pathways that manifest the trait of perceiving emerging novelty and thus co-creating transformational realities, an interstitial discovery of unseen possibilities and potentialities with all living systems. (To read more about the dragonfly as metaphor for cooperative evolutionary foresight and the power of diverse but integrative wholes to cultivate transformational realities, you can visit my primer on Holoptic Foresight Dynamics.)

As well as:

• Consciousness way-finder: Exhibiting thought and action that generates the development of consciousness as a fundamental element of universal expansion.
• Hope-diviner: Creating landscapes and pathways of desired possibilities.
• Thrivability architect: Moving beyond modes of plausible and probable surviving into environments of regenerative possibility.
• Challenger: Advocating for shifts away from extractive and exploitative systems.
• Spiraling integrator: Transcending and including thropugh the lens of higher order becoming.
• Love influencer: Basing organizational models, governance, and social construction on the fundamental of love.
• Broad-based prosperity promoter: Working towards a prosperous experience for all human and non-human entities.
• Spatio-temporal transcender: Grounding the interoceptive experience of the future as a normality that transcends the colonial fixation on linear space-time.
• Transformationalist: Embracing the natural and bio-cosmic reality of ongoing change in all living entities and systems.

Now that we have taken a brief look into The Illustrated/Fifth Wave Futurist as Visionary and Imaginist, we can begin to get a sense of how the Futurist can holistically manifest in the landscape of the metacrisis, being liberated and empowered to meet our world through transcending and including from the perspective of our present era. Said another way, the previous eras are reframed by our emerging states, being molded, shaped, or discarded accordingly. It is through this lens that we can both demystify (clarify and empower for a world in need) and re-mystify (reconnect to more holistic perspectives and processes of our cosmos) the walk, work, and will of the Futurist today.

Demystifying and Re-mystifying the Walk of the Futurist

As we continue further into the era of the Metacrisis, the discipline and field of the Futurist is not only one of embracing complexity as a natural expression of ever-increasing maturity in our cosmos, but it is also a practice of integrating and expanding consciousness as a symbiotic, cooperative evolutionary trait that fosters the perception of emerging novelty for the co-creation of transformational realities. In previous eras or waves, the Futurist was deconstructed into silos representing the linear and mechanical systems that acted as the building blocks for our extractive organizations, governmental models, and social constructs. (I realize that this expression still exists — transitions aren’t clean breaks from one era to another, and the systems of extraction are still dominating. Nevertheless, they are dead systems that cannot lead us into prosperous futures, and the signs of their demise are escalating.) These Futurist silos have made the field perplexing at best for the general public and have obscured the natural inheritance of foresight & futures thinking in all living beings and systems. The many manifestations of the Futurist as the “sage on the stage,” the “predictor,” the “trend forecaster,” the “quantifier of insights,” the “technology acolyte,” the “simplifier,” and the “strategic planner” have made the field (and the future) a dizzying and disconnected concept for most — the opposite of what we need in the face of the Metacrisis’ problem of discombobulated human interiority and relationality. This plethora of definitions surrounding the discipline of the Futurist has been quite confusing (not to mention untenable), and a more holistic approach to the field that platforms it around the reception of anticipatory imagination and visionary “becoming” for the co-evolution of living systems allows for a timely and necessary demystification of the field. At the same time, a re-mystification that incorporates the best of the former eras and waves through a “transcend and include” approach — defining previous eras through the lens of the Visionary and Imaginist — has the ability to reconnect the Futurist to the natural, evolutionary, and sacred elements found in the former waves: the “prophet” (the long-now of the storyteller and stories — not the short-termism of raw data — as the most powerful technique for transferring information and deep-meaning across generations), the “revelator” (including multiple and different ways of knowing that highlight a transrational perspective over a colonial, modern, literacy-based, and reductionist perspective that characterizes peak-rationality), the “philosopher” (the weaving of magic and science for an awe-inducing view of our cosmos in opposition to the soulless adherence to the religion of scientism), and the “strategist/technologist” (a healthy understanding of forming designs as aids for living systems rather than as replacements of living systems).

Demystifying and Re-mystifying the Work of the Futurist

The work of the Illustrated Futurist focuses much more on the shifting of systems and models for long-term-oriented actions that reflect care for people, planet, and purpose rather than on building strategies that “future-proof” the status quo decision-matrices of organizations and governments. Of course, this is easier said than done, as our present-day organizations and governments have been fundamentally designed with futures thinking antibodies — it’s a feature, not a bug. To this end, I have often said that we do not work for organizations and governments; we work for people, changing the hearts of individuals and groups to align with the futures consciousness qualities of empathy, equity, care, reconciliation, and love. (I expound on this ideas in my article The Heart of Foresight.) Over many years, I have attempted to instill a “futures culture” within organizations rather than simply doing surface-level foresight work that rarely if ever “sticks” or leads to more foresight efforts. However, even the idea of implementing roadmaps and milestones to create a futures culture within specific organizations and governments doesn’t really address the social, economic, and political alignment that these entities have with the larger systems of linear outputs, resource exploitation, short-term extraction, and values of domination (over partnership or cooperation). In reality, there is no futures culture without first establishing futures consciousness within healthy individuals who are exercising diverse perspectives towards collective higher order expressions. Again, we best demystify the work of the Futurist by decoupling it from the status quo values and decision matrices that seek to co-opt its emerging manifestations back into previous eras of colonial expressions, and then re-mystify that work by making sure it is connected to planetary decisions of wellbeing that are ancestral, generational, and interspecific in nature. The work of the Illustrated Futurist is to aid our organizations, governments, and societies to build processes and outcomes that align with those dynamics — not the other way around.

Demystifying and Re-mystifying the Will of the Futurist

In my short e-book entitled Embodying a Futures That’s ALIVE, I highlight a non-comprehensive set of universal states that define a more integral, experiential, and anticipatory world: abductive, liminal, interconnected, vibrant, and emergent. As a stark contrast to the “futures environments” of volatility, uncertainty, ambiguity, turbulence, brittleness, anxiousness, non-linearity, and incomprehensibility, the ALIVE perspective reframes our purpose and passion as being intimately connected the the world around us, inside of us, between us, and beyond us. (This is how Jonathan Rowson defines the Metacrisis — a world that is between and beyond, and that is re-orienting us to a new identity that we are presently struggling to adopt — but that is the way the world and our place in it actually works, and is the only way forward.) As Human Design expert Emi Hosotsuji has relayed to me, “ What of the wisdom of our intuition, gut feelings, emotions and our bodily sensations and experiences? What of the whispers and visions that are channelled through us? When we use only our minds to try to assess what may come, and plan for ideal scenarios and contingencies, it is as if we are only using our left oar to row the boat — this only leaves us going in circles. We see just a tiny sliver of the potentiality of futures.” The VUCA’s, TUNA’s and BANI’s are all fear-laden responses to the forceful shift in our physical, mental, emotional, and sacred sense of direction caused by the Metacrisis, and aligning with a new “cosmic residency” — one that we were always meant to inhabit — brings with it a new passion, purpose, and drive. The old drives fall away, lose their meaning, and become apparent as a “world before this world.” This revelation demystifies the seeming unanswerable question of “How can we respond to a VUCA world in all of its contradiction, complication, and chaos,” and resituates our existence within the awe, wonder, and excitement of life itself. Are our organizations, governments, and social constructs producing life itself? The Illustrated Futurist lives in this realm.

How and Who

As promised at the beginning of the article, I want to provide a brief note on the “how” and “who”: As you may have surmised by now, the Illustrated Futurist — a collection of may different living, moving, dynamic, and transformative stories — is not one person, but rather a many-eyed collective of anticipatory actors, both human and non-human. The Illustrated Futurist is a natural, organic, and evolutionary birthright of each and every one of us, and a way for us to collectively, cooperatively, and collaboratively co-create transformational realities in tandem qwirth the universe.

*Remember: the context that we find ourselves in frames and defines that we perceive to be of importance, whether that be common human activities such as work or leisure, popular ideas surrounding governance, or the curriculum that we deem to be important in our educational models— all of these and more are “realities” based on the dominant systems that birthed them. As contexts shift due to threshold events, our definitions and practices shift as well. This even applies to what we might call a “trend” — those influences and forces we identify aren’t inevitable nor rudimentary, but are rather an outcome of the systems that house them. If systems, contexts, and landscapes change, then what we even call a trend would be quite different. If we are already perceiving transformational systems change, even before it entirely replaces our dominant narratives, then we will become open to an entirely different field of perception and what is of importance in that new system of operation. I introduced this idea in a short video “Object Foresight vs. Process Futuring” from the ongoing Meditations in Transformations series.

This concept is important to this article because our definition of the Futurist depends on the cosmology to which we ascribe. You may completely disregard everything written in this article if you believe that modernity, capitalism, and markets is a higher order of existence and is only exponential expanding, as opposed to the recognition that a systems shift away from those concepts is taking place.