Naturalizing Futures Sensemaking: An Opportunity to Bridge the Gap Between Futures and Cognitive Science
By Dr. Jorge Camacho, Research Affiliate, Institute for the Future
In 2016, a group of cognitive scientists at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, developed a series of experiments that illustrate the essence of foresight in a deceptively simple form. The first of these experiments was performed with children between 2 and 4 years old. Researchers showed them a vertical tube and dropped a reward into the hole at the top. After a few tries, the children readily succeeded in the task of catching the reward by placing their hands at the bottom of the tube. Interestingly, the experiment was also performed with adult chimpanzees and orangutans, who easily caught the reward as well.
In the second experiment, researchers “made the future a little harder to predict.” [1] This time, they replaced the straight tube with a fork with two exits at the bottom, like an upside-down Y. In this way, the reward would come from one exit or the other. The results were much more interesting: two-year-old children and all of the apes failed the test because they covered only one of the exits and thus caught the reward about half of the time. In contrast, by age four, human children consistently succeeded in getting the reward by placing their hands at both exits.
This experiment occupies an important place in The Invention of Tomorrow: A Natural History of Foresight, recently published by Thomas Suddendorf, Jonathan Redshaw, and Adam Bulley, a team of cognitive scientists at the forefront of developmental and evolutionary studies that show how the capacity to imagine the future to act in the present is at the heart of human nature. Indeed, concerning the capacity of children as young as four to succeed in this experiment, they write: “Because humans can conceive of multiple versions of the future branching from the present, we can compare our options to select the best one.” From this perspective, the forked tube experiment may be seen as a physical instantiation of the “futures cone” that, for good and bad, is ubiquitous in the futures field.
Most importantly, from a methodological perspective, the experiment also illustrates the four-fold exploration of foresight that can be found in The Invention of Tomorrow. Following ethologist Niko Tinbergen, the authors explain that to understand the nature of foresight fully, it is necessary to assemble two proximate explanations (that describe the cognitive development and mechanisms enabling foresight) and two ultimate explanations (that lay out the evolutionary reasons for the development of foresight and its purpose), illustrating how this uniquely human ability has been shaped by our ancestral environment and has in turn shaped our cultural evolution.
In the context of evolutionary theory, proximate explanations address, so to speak, the “how.” In this case: How does foresight develop through an individual’s life? What cognitive mechanisms make foresight possible? Suddendorf, Redshaw, and Bulley dedicate the book’s first half to exploring these questions. They show us how children “gradually assemble their inner time machines” throughout their early years and how, although foresight continues to develop well until adulthood, they acquire the basic component capacities before primary school, as demonstrated by the forked tube experiment. Regarding the cognitive mechanisms that make foresight possible, they show how our brains use similar processes and pathways to anticipate the future and to remember the past. They propose that our capacity to recall distinct events from our past, termed “episodic memory”, might actually be an unintended side effect of a more evolutionarily valuable function known as “episodic foresight.” The latter refers to our ability to visualize a specific future event and then behave in ways that align with that imagined future.
One important issue that emerges from this peek under the hood is that, as the authors explain, the processes underlying our capacity for “mental time travel” exist in a continuum with how brains function across the animal kingdom. From this perspective, a question emerges: Do other species share our capacity to time travel mentally? As it turns out, contrary to some people’s expectations (which are mostly based on anecdotal evidence), the experimental studies presented in the book seem to show that most other animals, including our closest primate cousins and otherwise smart species such as ravens, are “stuck in the present.” For Suddendorf, Redshaw, and Bulley, foresight, or mental time travel, is a uniquely human capacity.
This is where the two ultimate explanations, i.e., those concerned with the “why,” come into the picture: Why did foresight evolve? What functions does it serve? The second half of the book is focused on these questions. In these chapters, the authors present a compelling story that begins about six million years ago with the last common ancestor we share with chimpanzees and how it faced a radical ecological transformation. Due to the tectonic plate movements driving the Great Rift Valley in East Africa, the rainforest that these apes inhabited changed to the grassy plains of a savannah. This radically different environment created evolutionary pressures for our forebears to cooperate more strongly within troops, to innovate by designing increasingly powerful stone tools, and, most importantly, to hone in on their mental time travel to prepare better, plan, and anticipate.
What’s most interesting, perhaps, is that these new behaviors, in turn, created their own selection pressures, thereby kickstarting a feedback loop between foresight and cultural evolution. One of my favorite examples in the book is the power of carrying devices such as bags or baskets. As the authors explain, these devices helped gather foods, in itself an expression of foresight and afforded the possibility of more sophisticated forms of preparation. What we have here, to borrow a phrase from speculative fiction author Ursula K. Le Guin, is a carrier bag theory of foresight. In prehistoric times, bags were both a reflection and a precursor of advanced planning capacities.
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I have mentioned here only a tiny sample of the wealth of ideas, theories, and empirical studies included in the book. One could argue that The Invention of Tomorrow represents the culmination of three decades of work that can be traced back to the seminal 1997 article “Mental Time Travel and the Evolution of the Human Mind,” co-authored by Suddendorf and an influential psychologist, the late Michael Corballis, or, for that matter, to Suddendorf’s 1994 master’s thesis developed under his supervision. This new book is, deservedly, gaining a lot of attention. For example, the BBC published a long-form essay adapted by the authors from the book’s material.
Fortunately, it has also reached the eyes of the community of foresight practitioners. Not surprisingly, though, the first reaction of many colleagues has been to complain about the book’s failure to engage directly with the large body of work that has emerged from the field of Futures Studies and Applied Foresight (FSAF) since at least the 1960s. The complaint, which I echo here, is absolutely correct. Indeed, one could only imagine how much richer and more relevant the book, particularly the last few chapters, would have been if the authors had taken the time to familiarize themselves with at least the basic ideas from our field.
At the same time, the failure runs both ways for, indeed, how many foresight practitioners have taken the time to engage with the growing body of foresight-relevant research out of evolutionary theory or developmental psychology? Here resides a great opportunity to bridge the gap between FSAF and the cognitive sciences. We could refer to this process as naturalizing futures sensemaking.
Many readers may recognize the concept of naturalizing futures sensemaking as a nod toward the leading management consultant Dave Snowden. Snowden is most well-known as the originator of Cynefin, a framework to help organizational leaders understand the context, environment, or problem space in which they find themselves to guide their process of decision-making and action. Cynefin, in turn, may be seen as one element in Snowden’s more encompassing approach of “naturalizing sense-making.”
Sense-making (or, alternatively, sensemaking) is used in various fields, including human-computer interaction, cognitive systems engineering, and knowledge management, to denote “the processes through which people interpret and give meaning to their experiences.” As Snowden puts it, the theory and practice of sense-making deal with the question, “How do I make sense of the world so that I can act in it?” From this perspective, one could argue that foresight is entirely included within sense-making or, at least, the two capacities intersect in important ways.
Snowden’s approach is recognized as a specific school within sense-making characterized by the naturalization alluded to in its name. This is derived from naturalistic approaches in philosophy. One example is the “naturalized epistemology” proposed in 1969 by the American philosopher W. V. Quine. For him, epistemology, traditionally understood as the study of how humans acquire knowledge, should fall within the scope of the natural sciences, specifically psychology. In this way, naturalized epistemology would be “the empirical study of how human beings develop a theory of the natural world on the basis of their sensory inputs.”
Following this philosophical approach, Snowden positions naturalizing sense-making in relation to other sense-making schools by using natural science — mainly the cognitive sciences but also complexity theory, ecology, and even physics — as an enabling constraint on the practice of sense-making. Enabling constraints, as defined by Cynefin, are rules, guidelines, and structure that impose limitations, which we can use to our advantage.This can be more easily grasped by looking at one of the examples most frequently mentioned by Snowden. A 2013 study published in the journal Psychological Science explored the phenomenon of “inattentional blindness.” Researchers asked a group of 24 radiologists to review a set of cases to detect familiar lung nodules, or small abnormal areas. In the last case, they overlaid an image of a gorilla 48 times the size of an average nodule over the CT scan. The results were fascinating: eighty-three percent of the participants did not see the gorilla even though, as recorded by eye tracking devices, they were looking directly at its location.
Snowden’s interpretation of the study is quite compelling. Inattentional blindness results from heuristics employed by our brain to solve the problem in a sufficient rather than optimal way. Evolution has shaped us to make decisions quickly and efficiently. These cognitive heuristics reduce the time and energy cost of decision-making. Most importantly, once we know this, we could find the seventeen percent of radiologists who did perceive the gorilla and, say, recruit them for a sense-making network. This is an example of using natural science as an enabling constraint: we work with such cognitive heuristics rather than trying to work against them.
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The concept of enabling constraint reminds me of a scene from an old French film, Alain Resnais’ Mon Oncle d’Amerique, where neurosurgeon Henri Laborit argues: “To go to the moon, we must know the laws of gravity. Knowing the laws of gravity doesn’t make us free of gravity. It merely allows us to utilize it.” Similarly, naturalizing futures sensemaking would entail using insights from the cognitive sciences to understand how our particular cognitive makeup both enables us and prevents us from practicing foresight in the way we collectively aspire to so that we can improve our concepts, tools, and methods. Fortunately, while this project is arguably still in its infancy, it is not unprecedented. A good recent example is Maree Conway’s article ‘Exploring the Links between Neuroscience and Foresight’ published last year in the Journal of Futures Studies.
The last two chapters of The Invention of Tomorrow are the most relevant for continuing the project of naturalizing futures sensemaking. To begin with, Suddendorf, Redshaw, and Bulley explore how the feedback loop between foresight and cultural evolution has resulted in the development of mental time travel tools such as calendars, money, and writing and how it may continue with next-generation digital technologies. Then, in the closing chapter, the authors explore, on the one hand, the greatest challenges that our civilization currently faces and, on the other, some of the shortcomings in our foresight that we’ll need to overcome to address them. Along with the optimism bias, the availability heuristic, and the planning fallacy, we learn about potential workarounds, such as premortems and precommitment devices.
Ultimately, the biggest challenge that we may face in the process of bridging the gap between cognitive science and FSAF is the important differences between the kind of foresight that is studied in the former and the kind of foresight that is practiced in the latter. These differences exist in at least three dimensions:
- The first of these may be called scale. Foresight in the cognitive sciences mainly refers to an individual’s ability to conceive alternative futures and use those to decide and act in the present. On the side of FSAF, even if there is a sub-discipline specialized in personal futures, most of the work is focused on cultivating foresight as a capacity that transcends the individual and is concerned with challenges and opportunities for organizations and social groups.
- The second dimension is the timeframe. At the most basic level, humans routinely use cognitive or psychological foresight to explore hours, days, weeks, months, or even years into the future. As we have seen, this is possibly a uniquely human capacity or, at least, remarkable compared to other species, mostly stuck in the present or the very short term. Futures and applied foresight, on the other hand, are normally concerned with much longer timeframes that can stretch from decades — e.g., IFTF’s Ten-Year Forecast — to centuries and beyond.
- The third dimension logically follows from the first two and could be called the degree of change. Arguably, the foresight studied by cognitive scientists, concerned as it is on the individual’s short term, mostly assumes a relatively stable environment. However, FSAF is mostly concerned with the radical and rapid amount of social, technological, economic, political, and ecological change unleashed since the 18th century and, most notably, since the second half of the 20th century, in the wake of the Great Acceleration.
The analogy of a board game could help us grasp the differences between the kinds of foresight along those three dimensions. Foresight, as studied by the cognitive sciences, would be the capacity of individual players to identify challenges and opportunities and foresee alternative outcomes considering other players’ moves as they pursue their own winning strategies. As practiced in the futures field, foresight would be as if the players — now assembled in teams — were playing a game that changed over time, being challenged thus to foresee changes in the rules, the board, the objectives, etc. Applied organizational foresight is about collectively leveraging individual foresight to successfully play a game that is itself changing and increasingly rapidly so.
As The Invention of Tomorrow shows, evolutionary theory and developmental psychology have made strides in understanding foresight as an individual cognitive capacity. The futures field has developed a great amount of methodological work to leverage foresight for the large-scale, long-term, and high degrees of change our civilization is dealing with. Suddendorf, Redshaw, and Bulley’s book is an important contribution in divulging the fascinating work developed by the authors and others in the cognitive sciences and making that knowledge available for other fields, including FSAF. Hopefully, the attention this book is getting, including this review, will encourage the construction of bridges in the other direction. A feedback loop between these fields is necessary to generate the transdisciplinary insights and practical innovations we urgently need.
[1] All quotes, except where noted, are from Suddendorf et al. The Invention of Tomorrow: A Natural History of Foresight.
Note: I want to thank Dr. Adam Bulley for our stimulating conversations over the last few weeks. Everything written here is my sole responsibility.
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