The Future Thinker’s Dilemma

our thinking and acting toward the future must challenge the systems that would seek to short-circuit the very future in which we hope to prosper. As author and philosopher Bonnitta Roy would say, we must “dream ourselves awake.”

“Right now, we have a crisis of leadership because we have a lot of un-whole people running the show. We can’t fault those people...they played the game as it was meant to be played. But, we can do better. And we must... We have a system built from a wounded, fragmented collective psyche that rewards unconscious, fragmented actions. It’s winner tak... See more

The first is from my friend Sabrina Meherally, the Founder of the inclusive design and imagination firm Pause and Effect:

Complex and non-prescriptive approaches to change, innovation, or design can often be invalidated through the assertion that they “sound nice” in theory, but “lack practicality”. In these cases, I am inclined to draw awareness t

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On the other end of the spectrum is where we experience the “Pull of the Future,” or the intentional thinking and acting around aspirational and transformational futures. As you might have imagined, this part of the spectrum aligns with the emerging novelty and anticipatory imagination of “Ontological Unpredictability.” Here — where the very nature... See more

On one end of this spectrum is the “Push of the Future.” This is where trends, issues, and events are driving us to react, pushing us into the future, many times kicking and screaming. Most of our organizations are familiar with the dynamics of this end of the spectrum, applying practices such as consumer insights, competitive intelligence, busines... See more

“The Official Future” tells us to “think exponentially, act incrementally,” beckoning us to utilize foresight in service of the ever-expanding present systems of quantifying, micro-analyzing, extracting, consuming, and automating. This way of futuring is at the heart of Epistemic Uncertainty. “The Emergent Future” instead challenges us to “ think t... See more

Design professor and philosopher Cameron Tonkinwise echoed this idea in a recent social media post when he noted,

“We think creatively (not predictively) about the future in order to decide what to do now in order to make possible different futures. There is no reason to be ‘future-oriented’ other than to try to change things, from now on . This mea

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These bedazzled methods fall under the category that Futurist Ilkka Tuomi labels as Epistemic Uncertainty , and the argument goes something like this:

“I’m unsure about the answer to this problem, but I can solve it by gathering more data. Once I gather more data related to the problem, I will be able to devise a solution.”

However, as Tuomi astutely... See more

Nevertheless, nary a month passes by that we don’t get yet another bright and shiny foresight methodology that promises to granularize information and atomize data so that we can finally solve the pesky problems plaguing the planet that were caused by — you guessed it — our extrapolative, exponential, and extractive practices of granularizing and a... See more