Futures thinking

Unlike humans, AI can’t flexibly navigate changing environments yet because it does not have a notion of its “self” and what it can do with it.

Optimizing future well-being with artificial intelligence: self-organizing maps (SOMs) for the identification of islands of emotional stability

We can use the shadow imagination as a mechanism for uncovering our future power. When we’re introduced to how bad things could get, we’re at a choice point. We can turn away, we can dive into the waters of the worst-case scenario and allow them to drown us, or we can touch the suffering that’s possible and remind ourselves of our own abilities. We... See more

Today, there is perhaps no animal we are more unmoored from than ourselves. ‘The world is now dominated by an animal that doesn’t think it’s an animal,’ writes the natural philosopher Melanie Challenger in How to Be Animal (2021) . ‘ And the future is being imagined by an animal that doesn’t want to be an animal.’

The Futures Triangle can also be used for inner

work. The pull of the future is where one

wishes to be, the desired personal life one

imagines for oneself. The weight of the past can

be blocks - inner or outer - preventing one from

achieving the vision. The pushes of the present

can be enablers or externals pushes one needs

to navigate.

The distinctive feature of imagination, therefore, rests on its capacity of creating new mental images by combining and modifying stored perceptual information in novel ways and by inserting this information in a subjective view of the world: hence it is related to his self-awareness. In other words, imagination is not simply the organization, iden... See more

Just like other iconic duos you already know — Simon & Garfunkel, Kirk & Spock, Sherlock & Watson — strategy and foresight are better together, because they amplify what each element could achieve alone. Strategy without foresight makes companies vulnerable to outside disruption. Foresight without strategy renders scenarios unactionable... See more