Design the Future
Our collective future is more uncertain than ever before. As citizens, we face changing job markets, environmental threats, worldwide pandemics, and the increasing polarisation of politics. In addition to this, businesses are facing every aspect of what we call ‘VUCA’ times: volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity are the business problems of this decade.
More often than not, we focus solely on the past or entirely on the now, and in random moments when we do envisage the future, those thoughts are dark. Negativity is a downward spiral, hard to get out of, hard to combat in isolation, alone.
Yet, the potential has never been greater for us all. Technology is advancing at a pace that will bring great value to the world, it’s ecology, and it’s people. We’re being driven apart by social media, but as a consequence, we’re becoming aware of the divide and starting to actively challenge it, and take steps to eradicate the bad parts of it from our lives.
We need, more than ever before, a positive outlook on the world we live within. We need to challenge the future we’re barrelling towards, we need to envisage new futures, positive futures, where we can design the outcome, and design what the world will be like for all of us, including ecology.
In terms of designing the future, a lot of organisations are starting to invest in moving towards things like Circular Economy, Carbon Neutral or Negative, Social Impact, Corporate Sustainability with actual ecological benefits, Corporate Social Responsibility with genuine community benefits. These are solutions that have the right intent, that aim for a more positive future outcome, and I’d add that we also need an ecosystem-wide corporate vision, that’ll bind each initiative together towards a shared vision.
Corporate visioning is not new, but the force to create one is getting stronger, and the process to create has changed drastically.
Enter Experimental Futures, which brings together speculative design, design fiction, and futuring to envisage and direct organisations towards individual futures in ways that engage people, that have foundations in values and beliefs, and that challenge the deep-seated roots of the status quo.
If you’re interested in the future, and designing and better one for yourself, or your organisation, start with an Experimental Futures Lab. The first three steps below are a brief explanation of what takes days and excludes the many methods and tools used to achieve better results. The fourth step outlines how you make those futures real, for your people, and the community around you, through Immersive Experiences.
1. Engage imaginaries
Using inputs from within and outside of your ecosystem (nothing is off the table) engage with your imagination correctly, for the first time since you were five years old, to capture data about how your future might play out. Consider each chain of events a potential future and understand how you might reframe towards a positive outcome.
2. Play with futures
Taking your population of futures, start to make big bets on events that you might think will occur, or not. Will smartphones still be around in 10years, or will they be replaced by AR or Brain Interfaces? Ask the tough questions about your products and services, will they survive? Explore your unique value proposition or sustainable competitive advantage and pick it apart, will it last? Play with your future. Bring out the Lego.
3. Transform today
Finally, use backcasting (the opposite of forecasting) to reverse engineer your path to a more positive and desirable future for your organisation, people, and ecosystem you operate within. Identify the drastic leaps that will help you genuinely shift the dial, commit to those leaps in the short term, and then…
4. Create Immersive Experiences
If you’re going to Design the Future, you’ll need to drive change by motivating and empowering your people. Immersive Experiences help organisations drive real change, not just the adoption of a new system, but a full-scale systemic change like reversing a negative culture, or changing a deeply-rooted value that brings negative behaviours. Several large organisations in Australia are currently using Immersive Experiences to reverse harmful elements of their business and drive positive change.
I’ve talked a lot about business in this post, but the Experimental Futures approach applies just as well to individuals and their career paths, or life.
If you want to know more about Experimental Futures, or would like us to help you with an Experimental Futures Lab, please get in touch: LinkedIn: Bryan Hoedemaeckers.
