Reexamining Official Futures
Imagining preferable futures that are actionable and relevant to our times.
This is part of an ongoing series created to supplement our upcoming book, “How to Future: Leading and Sensemaking in an Age of Hyperchange,” to be published in September 2020 by Kogan Page.
“…[L]iving with a radically open future is cognitively exhausting — people crave a sense of certainty about the future, which is precisely what the Official Future is meant to provide.”
At this moment in time, a lot of people are feeling stuck in quicksand because they’ve suddenly lost sight of the future they were expecting. No one ever wants to believe (much less suggest) that the worst possible scenario will actually happen. On a day-to-day basis, it’s a lot easier to go with the flow, always believing that the future will happen exactly as expected than it is to constantly worry about how things might play out differently. It’s a bet we all make with ourselves to just keep moving forward day by day, hoping that someone with a higher pay grade will be thinking prospectively about what happens next, then thoughtfully fixing all the bumps along the road that leads us to a neatly-packaged, preferred future. As first described decades ago by futures studies academic Jim Dator, these “Official Futures,” are the dominant images of what the future is supposed to be.
In futures work, this belief in dominant future narratives mainly presents barriers to open, flexible consideration of new possibilities and is often a hurdle that must be surmounted before real futures thinking can begin. Organizations large and small lean on official futures as north stars or guidance systems to keep employees, partners, shareholders, or constituents focused on a mission. What’s usually missing from official futures is an ability to pivot or adapt in the face of radical change, and shifting them is never easy because they tend to be deeply embedded into an organization’s psyche.
The stories we tell ourselves about the future, whether it’s the timelessness of a particular business model, the hegemony of an economic system, the durability of an ideology, or the boundaries of social or political acceptability can become barriers to change if they’re not periodically revisited, revised, and adapted for present realities which point to shifting future possibilities.
Official futures exist in almost every business, nation, and social group, and they reflect the overriding cultural assumptions which are necessary to believe in a mission, or “destiny.” They are the embedded strategic plans and roadmaps laid out by leaders or visionaries to guide everyone towards a unified preferred future. The reality of these visions is that they often only reflect the preferred future for a very specific subset of those being asked to invest in that future, or they ignore very real threats by casting them as unlikely to happen or ignoring them altogether. Maybe it’s time to reconsider the weak frameworks and pervasive ambiguity of official futures in this time of radical change.
An official future’s primary value is in representing a concept or aspirational goal, which, though that might sound similar to the aims of engaging in strategic foresight or futures work, is not actually the same thing. Perhaps the best way to describe an official future is as a positive, up-and-to-the-right-forever mission statement. They are often represented visually like this slide:
The language used above is telling: “accelerate,” “improve,” “build,” etc. all point to growth and financial gains, but there’s nothing there to explain how these improvements might actually be achieved, or in what climate they would be the best choice. The lack of detail is intentional. For example, is it prudent to “Accelerate the development of next-generation businesses” in an economic downturn? Has there been sufficient consideration of projected economic data to confirm that this is the best course of action for creating new value for a sustainable future?
There’s nothing wrong with businesses, (or individuals) anticipating and promoting a culture of success, improvement, innovation, or even a more sustainable future, but there is a tendency to make unsupported projections that are aspirational with no clear planning behind them. An official future simply acts as a motivational or inspirational metric for future advancement and prosperity. In times like these, not reconsidering an official future might suddenly seem uninformed and indifferent to the facts on the ground. Luckily, there are tools and processes which can help make even official futures more resilient in the face of unexpected and dramatic change.
“If you want to teach people a new way of thinking, don’t bother trying to teach them. Instead, give them a tool, the use of which will lead to new ways of thinking.”
― Richard Buckminster Fuller
In this incredibly turbulent year of 2020, it’s worth closely re-examining the official futures in which we have placed confidence in our own lives. Uncertainty is scary. No one wants to hear, “we don’t know” or “there is no planning for this,” whether that’s in reference to one’s corporate, or personal interests, but there can be a certain catharsis in considering the possibilities of “What’s next?” and contemplating new ways to forge pathways through the acknowledged uncertainties. Finding agency to adjust one’s own perspective, adapt what previously stood as a preferable future, then envisioning a different path to meet these new goals is a way to build more resilient futures, that can be both aspirational and durable.
“In this pandemic landscape, the tangled priorities of “get back to normal” and “accelerate the future” are conspiring to foreclose possibility, erase struggle, and ensure a future that has failed to address the problems of the past.”
Many of the organizations that we work with at Changeist come to us asking how we can help them achieve their Official Future, wanting to know what they should do to guarantee they meet their agenda. Needless to say, it’s a flawed question that very much puts the cart before the horse.
A more productive process is to frame a better question through researching the landscape of possible issues ahead that might influence or affect emergent futures, then, if appropriate, developing a few conceivable scenarios based on how future goals and the possible landscape might interact. This is the time to consider how best to navigate toward a preferred future in which those goals might be met within each scenario.
Of course, it’s impossible to cover every conceivable divergence, but a robust process of research, stress testing, and discovery can often expose gaps in thinking, uncover new unknowns, or provoke a rethinking of so-called outlier events, (such as economic collapse, or pandemics). They can also surface unexplored or unrecognized opportunity spaces which lead to reframing what “preferred” means, even in less than positive circumstances. This is the point at which to look back at the Official Future and ask whether it still makes sense given the new maps of the future that have been developed.
Given all that we face at the moment, the stakes are high. Clinging to an official future not only leaves us with outdated beliefs and ineffective plans, but it potentially deprives many of us of the agency to realize the futures we want and deserve. This is a good moment to take a step back, ask who gets to decide, what beliefs those decisions are based on, and then reassess, either through rigorous sense-making and scenarios, or simply deep and inclusive dialogue, to choose an aspirational future to aim for.
You can pre-order How to Future: Leading and Sensemaking in an Age of Hyperchange and find more resources at howtofuture.com/buy.
