“Forging the Futures”: What is this ?

So maybe you find somewhere a link to this blog and you’re wondering what the f**k is this “Forging the Future”. It’s a good question and I’ll try to explain at my best later, ’cause the generation process of this blog has been far from to be linear. For now, I’m going to tell you what you’ll find in this publication: we are going to talk about the Future.

“Oh, another guru-preacher-magician who’ll pretend to read the crystal ball and to know what will happen tomorrow”.

I can’t blame you. If I were you I would tell exactly the same but relax, it’s not like that. I don’t know how the future will be. No one knows and this is the exact reason why I decide to start this blog.

Future is a serious shit and it’s a very, very complex matter and its complexity makes it so fragile that just a single, insignificant event, can deeply change the final result.

Without annoying you — just for now — with definition, theories, models and stuffs like that, I’ll try to explain you moving from one of my favorite movies: Back To The Future (Robert Zemeckis, 1985). The movie contains all the reference needed to understand what future thinking and design is about.

The “Calvin Klein” Effect

Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) back in 1955 saved his father George McFly (Crispin Glover) from being hit by the car of his gran father. Doing like that, Marty prevented the first meeting between his father and his mother, making Lorraine Baines (Lea Thompson) infatuated of “Calvin Klein”, changing the timeline and risking to be deleted by the existence. While trying to fix the error, Marty made his timid and submissive father George to overtake Biff Turner (Thomas F. Wilson) and to make Lorraine falling in love with him. Once back to 1985, Marty finds out a new family where George is a famous sci-fi writer, his mother is “so thin”, both “beautiful” and Biff Turner no more George’s boss but his car caretaker.

As Dr. Emmett Brown (Christopher Lloyd) repeatedly tells Marty along the trilogy, every single decision or action dictates a change in timeline and in the last sequence of Back To The Future Part III he tells both Marty and Jennifer (Elizabeth Shue) that the future is not written and it’s our daily decisions that progressively write it.

Future is not written but the present has consequences

Back To The Future reference helps to understand something about the Future:

• Future is the result of causal relationship of multiple events, changing the outcome of one event influences the world deeply (deletion from existence), substantially (George from looser to cool) or superficially (to have the car for the night at the lake).
• The “Calvin Klein” effect tells us that once you change any variable, no matter how much hard you work to fix, the future will not be the same anymore.
• Events apparently unrelated can be influenced by occasional events: Marty McFly meets Marvin Berry that is Chuck Berry’s cousin who is introduced to “Johnny B. Goode” song played by Marty at the school dancing night. Michel J. Fox becomes the putative father of the song in the collective imaginary.

• If you know the outcome you want to achieve (making George and Lorraine to fall in love), the system functioning (Hill Valley, the school, the “Enchant under the sea” night) you can manipulate those variables to get the expected result.
• If you, then, can catch the unexpected (George hitting Biff), you can also imagine how this will influence the outcome (a successful family, that Marty couldn’t imagine, but Doc Brown guessed)

Future is unpredictable but we can forge it

In Back To The Future, Marty can count on a strength: in every moment he knows how the future should be, he has a map of all the events forging his future, so he can consciously manipulate or force events towards a known future.

We are not so lucky. We don’t know how the future will be and we don’t know what will define it, which are the milestones in the sequence of events that will determine the tomorrow.

At the same time, we are lucky. To not know what the future will be, make us free to decide how we want it to be. Marty’s knowledge on how his future is, makes him to be forced to achieve that precise outcome. His action are pushed by something preset. Once he gets back to 1985, he is surprised and shocked to see his family improvement. He din’t expected it and probably he also didn’t recognize how it has been possible. It happens because he was so keen to restore the corrupted past that he couldn’t keep the mind open to imagine the consequences of small changes happening.

Forging the Futures

Here it is why “forging the future” name. Contrary to Marty, we don’t know our future and we are free to build more than one (here it is the reason of the plural): the one we prefer, the one we want to avoid, the one possible, the one probable. In order to get this competence, we have to open our mind to the complex system of our world, finding relations among the events and observing and reasoning about the consequences. We have to be able to figure out the scenarios that can be written and how we can do it.

But this is another world-story…