During a Pandemic, We Urgently Need to Stretch Our Imagination
By Jane McGonigal, Ph.D., IFTF Director of Game Research and Development
Writing this from Italy, I am also writing to you from your own future. From our state of emergency, we have been watching the crisis unfold in the United States with a terrible sense of foreboding. Please stop waiting for others to tell you what to do; stop blaming the government for doing too much or too little. We all have actions we can take to slow the spread of the disease — and ensuring that your own household has enough canned goods and cleaning supplies is not enough. You can do a lot more. You should do a lot more. Stay away from restaurants, gyms, libraries, movie theaters, bars and cafes, yes. But also: Don’t invite people over for dinner, don’t let your kids go on playdates, don’t take them to the playground, don’t let your teenagers out of your sight. They will sneak out with their friends, they will hold hands, they will share their drinks and food. If this seems too much, consider the following: We are not allowed to hold weddings or funerals. We can’t gather to bury our dead. For us, it might be too late to avoid an incredible loss of life. But if you decide against taking actions because it seems inconvenient, or because you don’t want to look silly, you can’t say you weren’t warned.
— “Hello from Italy, Your Future is Grimmer Than You Think”, March 17, 2020
“The future is already here. It’s just not evenly distributed.” This is one of our guiding principles at the Institute for the Future (IFTF). It means that if you look closely around the world today, you can see potentially big changes already starting to develop. They’re happening locally, at the edges of technological experimentation, social behavior, business innovation, health trends, or political uprisings. These “signals of change” could be the beginnings of societal-scale disruption. If you spot these clues quickly and imagine how they could impact you personally, then you can prepare for and adapt to the coming global changes faster.
This bit of wisdom was first stated by the science fiction writer William Gibson in 1990. But has it ever been truer than it is now, 30 years later, as we live through the COVID-19 pandemic?
For most of the planet, our future is already here, arriving first in Wuhan, then Iran, and then Italy. In each of these regions, on a few weeks’ time delay, the novel coronavirus has exploded with the kind of exponential growth that leaves even the most advanced health care systems unable to cope. Or, perhaps a different future is already here, distributed somewhere else. In South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore the future of this pandemic looks better. The COVID-19 case fatality rate there is much lower, and viral growth much slower. Governments and businesses have been able to intervene more effectively against the pandemic, by more quickly undertaking widespread social distancing measures and large-scale testing.
Right now, those of us behind the Wuhan and South Korea curves are being given the opportunity to clearly see our own possible futures. And we’re looking at two very different scenarios, depending on the actions we take now. But time to change our future is running out. Experts believe much of Europe and the United States, for example, are just nine to ten days behind the curve of Italy and Iran.
Ten days is not a lot of time to change the future.
Ten days is not a lot of time to change the future. How can we possibly reinvent virtually everything about how we work, eat, learn, socialize, and live, so fast? In places like France, Norway, New York City, and the San Francisco Bay Area, drastic measures like nationwide lockdowns and shelter-in-place orders are being taken. But have they been taken quickly enough? And will people follow the guidelines or orders? So far, the signs are not great — many people continue to socialize in large groups and gather on the streets despite guidelines, and individuals defy self-isolation and quarantine orders.
The problem, as many data scientists and cognitive psychologists have already explained, is that our brains are not designed to anticipate exponential growth. We cannot easily predict or imagine the kinds of rapid, previously unimaginable changes they bring. For people in parts of the world further behind the curve of pandemic than earlier-hit regions, the reality of what is already starting to happen feels as unfamiliar and distant as a future world 50 years from now — when in truth, it may be just days or weeks away.
In regions that have been hard hit by COVID-19, they are trying to show us our future, urgently, desperately. This past weekend, a documentary filmmaker created a compilation of video messages from the future — “What I wish I could tell myself, 10 days ago” featuring Italian citizens now in quarantine. And today, The Washington Post published an op-ed: “I’m in Spain, but this is a message from the future.” They are sending us these messages from the future because, despite all the evidence already distributed, unevenly, across the planet — we just can’t believe it could happen to us.
We have to get better at accepting the reality of our future sooner — the cost of waiting is too high.
We have to get better at accepting the reality of our future sooner — the cost of waiting is too high. We have to quickly train our brains to get comfortable with uncomfortable possibilities. We have to help each other believe that the things we accept today as a given, as unchangeable, can rapidly become different. And we have to get better at identifying the key moments in which every individual decision we make is also making history, by helping decide what our collective future will be.
As the Director of Game Research + Development at IFTF, I’ve tried to do my small part to help people get past the mental barriers to anticipating and believing in the full economic, social, and emotional ripple effects of global threats like pandemics. In 2008, I was the game designer for a six-week future IFTF forecasting simulation called Superstruct. During this game, nearly 10,000 people worldwide simulated living through five different threats, including a global outbreak of a fictional virus called ReDS (short for Respiratory Distress Syndrome). (Just a warning: The content of the linked video is a fictional news report on the hypothetical virus that we considered in our simulation, and it may be upsetting to some given the current situation.)
There were no mathematical computations involved in our simulation. Instead, we simply asked people to predict how they personally would feel and what they would do in their own lives during this kind of rapidly spreading outbreak. How would they change their daily habits? What social interactions would they avoid? Would they — could they — work from home? Would they choose to self-quarantine — and if so, when, why, and for how long? During a government mandated quarantine, what problems might they experience? What kinds of support and resources would they need?
Our simulation was low on algorithms, but high on social and emotional intelligence. When the novel coronavirus first came to global attention in early 2020, I thought the most important findings from our simulation were the predictions. For example, one of my main research questions was: Under what circumstances would people resist voluntary quarantine and social distancing? Religious worship and nightclubs and dances were the top two, followed by important professional networking opportunities and weddings. This research matters, because it suggests which kinds of events we all should be more proactive about canceling if we have the power to do so. Early in January, I suggested in an IFTF Ask a Futurist Series webinar: “If you can postpone or make virtual religious worship, social dances, a wedding, or a professional conference or networking event, data suggests it would be the highly responsible thing to do.” Look at the headlines that have followed since, and it’s clear that this insight from our simulation was both useful and actionable. People are doing what they predicted they would do — going to nightclubs despite the urgent messaging to stay at home, going to religious services despite being tested for COVID-19, attending a university networking event despite being told to self-isolate.
But now, watching how many of us have been slow to react to the growing threat in our own lives and how stuck our leaders have been in old ways of thinking and doing, I think the most important work of a large-scale, social simulation is not to accurately predict what people will do. Instead, the most important impact is simply to prepare our minds, to stretch our collective imagination, so we are more flexible, adaptable, agile, and resilient when the “unthinkable” happens.
Since early January, I’ve been receiving text messages and Facebook messages from people who participated in IFTF’s Superstruct Quarantine simulation. They’ve said things like, “I’m not freaking out, I already worked through the panic and anxiety when we imagined it ten years ago,” and “Time to start social distancing!” and “I’m starting to prepare for this now, I remember what it was like in Superstruct” — all weeks before it hit the mainstream consciousness to start to consider making serious changes to our habits and plans. Our simulation participants keep telling me that pre-feeling the future helped them pre-process the anxiety, the overwhelming uncertainty, and the sense of helplessness, and move more rapidly to adapt and act resiliently when the future actually arrived.
The only way to prepare individually and collectively for what feels unimaginable today is to spend time, deeply imagining it together.
What can we do now, and going forward? I believe the basic skills of futures thinking can help us all not get blindsided by the COVID-19 impacts that are coming faster than we think. And if we start practicing them now, they can help us not get blindsided by whatever else comes — the pandemics, social upheavals, climate change consequences, or other “unthinkable” possibilities that are sure to unfold over the next decade and beyond.
Here are some links to four simple futures thinking techniques anyone can practice. I teach these to continuing studies students in my “How to think like a futurist” courses at Stanford University, and in five “futures thinking” classes that are free for anyone to audit at Coursera.org.
1. Look for the decisive moments in the past that changed the course of the future. How would your reality be different, if you had made a different choice in the past? This is called counter-factual thinking, and you can watch me teach three counterfactual thinking techniques in this video: The Future is Dark, and That’s a Good Thing.
2. Practice hard empathy. It’s a cognitive skill that allows us to imagine what it would feel like to experience something we have no firsthand experience with. Here’s how it works: Find a news story about what is happening with COVID-19 now, somewhere else in the world that is further along the pandemic curve than your region. What if YOU were experiencing that reality, where you live today? Try to imagine it as vividly as possible. I explain more about this technique in this quick article: How to Think Like a Futurist.
3. Get comfortable with the idea that anything can be different in the future — and by the future, we now mean next month, next week, or even tomorrow. I created this game that will challenge your assumptions about what can’t be different, and show you 100 ways life as you know it could be transformed sooner than you think. You can get the rules and tips for playing in this PDF: 100 Ways Anything Can Be Different in the Future.
4. Pre-feel the future. You can learn a scientifically validated cognitive intervention called “Specificity Training,” designed to help you vividly imagine the “unimaginable” as if it were already a memory you could look back on. This will help make your brain believe that “unthinkable” change can in fact be real. Learn the technique and its history here: Fill in the Blanks, and Train Your Brain to See Clearly What Isn’t There (Yet).
There are so many urgent challenges to meet, so much caretaking to do, so many practical realities we are all trying to figure out. Today may not be the right time for you, personally, to pick up these skills. But if you are staying at home, if you’re self-isolating and looking to build up some mental and emotional resilience for the future to come, bookmark this link, or share it with a friend. Perhaps in the coming weeks or months, these tools and mental habits will be something you can pick up and play with. The world, now and moving forward, needs many flexible, open minds simulating our individual and collective futures. Our future is already here, but if we see it coming, we can change it, together.
