The Future Thinker’s Dilemma

In Reality, the Focus on “Problem” is Foresight’s Biggest Problem

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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“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

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

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

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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Of course, it was also noted by philosophers Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Žižek that “It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” Such a statementdisplays the narrative weight under which our future visions struggle, and why we must cultivate imagination, opportunity, and transformation that transcends our present systems... 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

• Foresight has an action problem (too quick to action before considering alternatives, possibilities and consequences due to our preference for short-termism, quick wins, productivity, efficiency, etc.)


• Foresight has a “past”problem (assuming that the future will always mirror the past and present, when both the nature of the future is changing and o

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