The Future Thinker’s Dilemma

extrapolation , exponentiality , and extraction . These three “dominant narratives” not only drive our technological, economic, and political outcomes, but define how we approach and use innovation, strategy, design, organizational development, social construction, and — yes — even foresight to reinforce their.

“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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

... See more

Why are we futuring to find solutions to the problems created by extrapolative, exponential, and extractive systems, when we should be futuring to imagine emerging novelty and construct transformative realities that would allow us to elevate our human, planetary, and universal experience above and beyond those systems?

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

... See more