future mapping

Try as we might to utilize reason and logic for our arguments, the human race is first and foremost an emotional species. On a base level, I might even say that the most important aspect of foresight is the ability to create emotional connections between people and their possible, probable, preferred, and preventable futures.

Vision: A nonprofit startup starts with a vision. There must be some large, intractable problem, for which the solution is hard to capture value from. This must be the animating vision behind the nonprofit, like Stripe’s ‘increasing the GDP of the internet’ or SpaceX’s ‘colonize Mars’. The vision must be sufficiently ambitious to attract talent

imagination, rather than being seen as an ‘essential skill’, is commonly perceived as messy, unpredictable, a bit cheeky, potentially uncontrollable and a frivolous and unprofitable use of time.

And basically, my gripe is, we collectively generally treat every transition the way I used to treat “time for recess”: This is just going to happen, so let’s not focus on how it’s going to happen, or whether the getting there is hard. Let’s just get from here to there, OK? And then we can be there and forget about here.

TL:DR — It is impossible for organisations to “demonstrate their impact” if they work in complex environments. Asking them to do so requires them to create a fantasy version of the story of their work. This corruption of data makes doing genuine change work harder because it is difficult to learn and adapt from corrupted data.