The Future Thinker’s Dilemma

“Of course it has,” you might say, “that’s the entire point of applying foresight to our organizations, governments, and social entities.” However, as Albert Einstein was famous for saying, “ No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it ” Put another way, you can’t solve a problem within the context of that problem.... See more

Our present-day solutions are born from the present-day problems of our present-day systems that are fueled by our present-day perspectives, and foresight/futures thinking should be offering us an entirely different way of perceiving the world that supersedes our limited assumptions, our system-defined problems and our context-limited solutions.

1. Foresight has a trend problem — today’s trend hunting is largely a by-product of a linear, mechanistic, and extractive system that hopes to profit off of the “next big thing,” and is also mired in a hyper-masculine perspective of what’s important or what should be examined.


2. Foresight has a time problem — “This or that will happen in the next 1, 3,

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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

As author and philosopher Bonnitta Roy would say, we must “dream ourselves awake.”

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.”

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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Foresight has a measurement problem — “Data, data, everywhere, but we never stop to think” or the idea that we are attempting to measure the future when a.) you can’t measure the future any more than you can capture your shadow, and b.) if the nature of the future is shifting and changing, then why do we think that the metrics that drive our prese

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