Futures thinking

While most people tend to be optimistic, those suffering from depression and anxiety have a bleak view of the future — and that in fact seems to be the chief cause of their problems, not their past traumas nor their view of the present. While traumas do have a lasting impact, most people actually emerge stronger afterward. Others continue... See more

While it’s tempting to play with scenario planning and leave it at the implications, we must not hide behind the data, deck or titles of our roles, protecting us from the vulnerability of getting out there and doing the messy work: making the futures we wish to see.

There is indirect evidence to support this idea. For instance, individuals tend to act in a way that is consistent with or constrained by how they have imagined themselves in those situations (Johnson and Sherman, 1990), implying that some record of that simulation influences later behavior. There is typically a high correspondence of stated... See more

a polyvagal futures literacy offers foresight practitioners and learners a powerful framework for meeting the future with agency, hope, and inner resourcefulness in the face of its complexity.

the default network consists of regions that, in the absence of exteroceptive [externally oriented] attention or narrowly focused mental effort, support self-directed concerns, immersion in one’s inner life (e.g., daydreaming) or imagining the inner life of others (Theory of Mind)

a particularly vivid form of future thinking: the imaginative construction or simulation of scenarios that might occur in one’s future. We hypothesized that the flexible use of episodic details from memory during imaginative simulations of the future can help to understand constructive aspects of memory, such as its susceptibility to distortion... See more