How to Future

Scenarios should also give a sense of the broader dynamics of the world in which they take place. They can convey urgency, optimism, difficulty, harmony, dissonance or other attributes that might characterize the context in which the trends unfold. Remember, however, that scenarios aren’t meant to ‘sell’ a future but to give it depth and believabil

For our purposes, we look at scenarios as a means of depicting a ‘slice’ or portion of a future. To be useful, scenarios should be plausible in the sense of not being so exotic that they’re unthinkable or alienate the audience to the point of rejection (note that ‘unimaginable for the organization’s current mission’ shouldn’t be a criterion for rej

The intent of How to Future is to provide a way of looking at prospective problems, questions or challenges that, over time, becomes ingrained as a useful method for considering what could be. Futuring isn’t a once a year or a few times per quarter event; it’s an always-on way of thinking about what’s next, with a dimension of nimbleness and fluidi

Political and economic visions, belief systems and cultures are all suddenly up for grabs. With the collapse or serious decay of many (mostly Western) critical narratives – like the social contract, popular democracy, human rights and the right to privacy – comes a need to either refresh and resuscitate these ideals, replace them with older, alread

The important accomplishment here is that by first placing and considering the relationships among drivers and trends, then deepening the roadmap by playing out some impacts or implications, you have arrived at a map of multiple possible futures around an issue or topic question that can now be delved into more deeply through further detailed narra

Simple scenarios function in much the same way – they provide a narrative in which different trends and forces can unfold, move, interact and illustrate their relevance, as well as providing a space where tensions can surface usefully.

In futuring, the artefact is the minimum viable expression of a future situation, which lives inside a scenario that, as futurist Wendy Schultz says, contains ‘upsides and downsides’.7 Artefacts are not an attempt to demonstrate a means of resolving problems that exist within the larger world. As we’ve written elsewhere, in the futuring context we

You can research, assess, construct and communicate versions and variations of futures to better understand probable, plausible and possible landscapes that lie ahead, regardless of the question, space or realm you wish to imagine, explore, plan for – or against. It takes a future, even a speculative, strange, uncanny or orthogonal one, to fill a v

Canadian researcher Keith Oatley calls fiction ‘the mind’s flight simulator’.