old keys won't open new doors

the overarching early 21st-century conundrum is not so much about problem-solving or policy innovation, but primarily a challenge of perception and imagination

foresight has (generally) been looking to solve present-day problems that exist as a direct result of the life-draining systems that we presently inhabi t.

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.

Many of us have clear visions of what kind of world we don’t want to live in, but are struggling to imagine the kind of world we would live in - let alone how to build that world. We need new narratives to illuminate what’s broken in our society and hands-on solutions for a more sustainable, equal and resilient world.

as Albert Einstein was famous for saying, “ No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it ” Put another way, you can’t solve a problem within the context of that problem.

Our practice of “futuring to the problem” (a phrase that mirrors the idea of “teaching to the test” — a colloquial term for any method of education whose curriculum is heavily focused on preparing students for a standardized test), has resulted in the development of a plethora of tools and methods in the field of foresight that are meant to help us

Erwin Schödinger: “The task is not so much to see what no one has yet seen; but to think what nobody has yet thought, about that which everybody sees.”

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?