Random thoughts for World Futures Day 2022

World Futures Day - a time to promote Futures thinking and Strategic foresight.
I decided to jot down some random thoughts, bust some myths, and even provide a rebuttal to a few of the more entrenched views put forward by some people not working in futures thinking.

1. Today is history tomorrow.
So, what history have you been making today?

Our perception of time and interlinking it with "what was, what is, and what may yet be", is a fascinating subject.

No matter how much we may try to cut the thread from the past to free us up to think openly about possible futures, we still need to respect and understand the weight of the past that has led us to where we are now.

Futurist Sohail Inayatullah points to macrohistory as a way to assist with the study of the future. Macrohistory looks at large, long-term trends in world history to establish ultimate patterns and cycles throughout our history. He makes the point that macrohistory presents us with the weight of history, balancing the pull of our image of the future. Yet, like futures studies, it seeks to transform past, present, and future, not merely reflect upon social space and time.

However, even today’s dominant notion of a linear past, present, and future is challenged. 

Many indigenous cultures do not see it that way.

 Instead, some see time as a loop, and others believe that all possible states (past, present, and future) are ‘now’. This is something that quantum physics may one day, prove to be correct.


2. We must beware of echo chambers.

While it is encouraging that more people and organisations are opening themselves up to thinking deeply about the future(s), we need to be careful that we don’t end up merely operating in our own echo chamber.

When we pursue our interests online, they are fed back to us by amazing algorithms that give us more of what we are looking for and suggest more of the same. The trouble is that our feeds become infested with even more content from ‘people like us', and we begin to believe that the world has truly woken up to, and supports what we do – and so the echo chamber that feeds our confirmation bias is created.

Personally, although it is encouraging to feel part of a growing movement, I am not overly interested in the rise in the number of international futures organisations and educational offerings. 

On the other hand, I am extremely interested in the number of businesses and other organisations that are seriously committed to futures thinking and their strategic foresight journey, and those with their own practitioners. Of most interest though, is being able to read more case studies, especially from those organisations that have seen real improvements in their businesses and the health and wellbeing metrics of their people.


3. Futures thinking is a therapy for massive uncertainty.

 
From whichever point of view we look at it, we are living in strange times indeed. Change is coming at us from everywhere - technology, geopolitics, societal shifts, culture, and the media, and climate change concerns. Change creates uncertainty. Too much uncertainty creates discomfort and stress. Too much stress leads to mental health issues – something we should all be deeply concerned about. Uncertainty lies wherever things are unresolved, so is it any wonder people are overwhelmed, exhausted, and damaged?

Futures thinking and strategic foresight help us and our people feel more in control and reduces those feelings of uncertainty, by equipping us with tools and approaches to help create the desired future for our own organisation.

This is not just wishful thinking. We have agency - the capability to act to produce a particular result. Using strategic foresight can provide a partial antidote to these turbulent times. We can begin to make sense of what comes after what comes next.

4. Futures thinking is just storytelling…..
…..and is not useful unless you are a sci-fi author.

It’s Friday morning. You wake up and start thinking about what you are going to do over the weekend. You check the weather forecast and look online to see what’s on.
Welcome to futures thinking – at a micro-level.

So, planning for the weekend. Our knowledge is high. The data supports it. Certainty is high.

Now let’s think about a critically important part of a business. Developing a business strategy for the next 3 -5 years. We have less knowledge and we are now using more intuition.
In this case the data is more historical and trended. There is less certainty.

Let's look out even further. Creating a 5-10-year vision for your organisation, your North Star.
Moving from intuition, we are now entering the zone of intelligent guesswork.
The reliability of the data is low, and the level of uncertainty is much higher.
Why? Because there are no facts in the future.

But here’s the thing. We have agency. And as mentioned in an earlier piece, this is the capability to act to help affect and/or produce a particular result.
The point is that even if you are thinking about the great weekend ahead, or planning for an overseas holiday next year, you are already doing basic futures thinking. You are constantly checking in real time for potential problems or opportunities and will adapt your plan as needed.
However, don’t kid yourself, when you are planning your holiday, you are telling yourself a story about it, and will be working hard to make it come true in some way.
Any forward planning is at some level, futures thinking. 

Any view of a desired future state is one of many you will have mentally sorted through to arrive at. The only difference is that the further out we are thinking, the less certainty we have.

Futures thinking and strategic foresight is a team sport aimed at co-creating a strong narrative to inspire those around us to navigate towards and act upon opportunities to create the preferred future.
To do this we need an insatiable curiosity and an always-on approach to look for signals and emerging issues that point to potential changes. We need to develop the skills to use various tools and canvases to guide us in our thinking.
Some may call it guesswork; I think it is Imagination Leadership.

5. Futures thinking is naïve optimism at best, and toxic positivity at worst.

When thinking about the future, if we rely upon the mainstream news media, the world is a dark place, full of woes. It is easy for our shadow selves to imagine an apocalyptic future world of war, hunger, and poverty, a world ravaged by climate change and global populations decimated by pandemics.
And that is the point. It is easy to do that and requires little to no imagination to summon that vision.

Often, futurists and strategic foresight practitioners are accused of being blindly optimistic, or worse, toxically positive in the face of all that is going wrong.
Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, no matter which school of thought a futurist adheres to, we always use our shadow side to look at the possibility of a collapse scenario or to understand how the weight of the past may provide obstacles to achieving the desired outcome. We explore what that might mean so we can be ready to act if needed.
We choose to spend our time thinking about influencing what we can to help our preferred future come to pass.
The words ‘optimist’ and ‘optimism’ are used by most futurists, but always with a qualification, for instance ‘Urgent Optimists’ (IFTF), pragmatic optimism, or even bounded optimism.

To make a change, to help navigate toward a preferred future, we need to know what it is that we want, what conditions we will need to get there, and then work towards it. 

Otherwise, we will merely drift like flotsam in the waves of wherever the apocalyptic and pessimistic may take us.