future mapping
the why and the how
future mapping
... See moreMost critically, these roles tend to be self-reinforcing. Organizations using fear-based future narratives often develop risk-averse cultures that further reinforce defensive positioning. Conversely, organizations with aspirational future narratives tend to attract optimistic, innovation-minded talent that strengthens their future-positive culture.
Patrick Tanguay (Sentiers) • 📡 No.338 — Is AI Progress Slowing Down? ⊗ Future Orientation ⊗ the Power of Critical Sensemaking
Hope locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act. When you recognize uncertainty, you recognize that you may be able to influence the outcomes—you alone or you in concert with a few dozen or several million others. Hope is an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable,
... See moreRebecca Solnit • Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities
As Donella Meadows, co-author of the Limits to Growth studies, asks, ‘How did we arrive at a culture that constantly, almost automatically, ridicules visionaries? Whose idea of reality forces us to “be realistic”? When were we taught, and by whom, to suppress our visions?’
Rob Hopkins • From What Is to What If: Unleashing the Power of Imagination to Create the Future We Want
“the anxiety of doing something that is not conventional is a major sense of something being heavily burdened with risk. And if you're a senior, if you're a CEO or you're a C-suite person, and you see something that doesn't feel familiar, you feel that it's either heavily risky or it's not going to work, because that's not the way X other brands in
... See moreThe problem (or at least one of the problems) is that the twin edicts to simultaneously optimize your team and life and to be flexible in light of an uncertain future are in opposition to each other. Optimization presumes a kind of certainty about the circumstances one is optimizing for, but that certainty is, more often than not, illusory.
Mandy Brown • Against Optimization
Something sinister happened over the past algorithmically driven decade: brands took a sharp turn toward efficiency and benefits mindshare, often focusing on a laundry list of functional and emotional whoop-de-doos.
It’s this paint-inside-the-lines mentality that stokes irrelevancy and meaninglessness. And the whole point of a brand is to create an... See more
It’s this paint-inside-the-lines mentality that stokes irrelevancy and meaninglessness. And the whole point of a brand is to create an... See more
From Brand Strategy to Brand Anarchy
Making systems resilient is fundamentally at odds with optimization, because optimizing a system means taking out any slack. A truly optimized, and thus efficient, system is only possible with near-perfect knowledge about the system, together with the ability to observe and implement a response. For a system to be reliable, on the other hand, there
... See moreMandy Brown • Against Optimization
Innovation begins with inspiration. Positive visions of the future inject people with imagination, which pulls the future forward.
David Perell • Peter Thiel’s Religion
Cultures vary in the degree to which they value openness and tolerate uncertainty. Some cultures lead people to experience anxiety in situations that are ambiguous or unpredictable, and these cultures are structured in ways that make the world seem more stable and predictable through strict rules and laws, shared beliefs, and circumscribed ways of
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