How Futurists Cope with Pandemics (and Other Uncertainties)
Use futures, narratives and hope to boost resilience
Futures
The job of a futurist is to explore multiple alternative futures — different ways in which the world might evolve — and help individuals or organisations create better futures. I noticed from my work with clients that the pandemic made conversations about futures, and especially about personal futures, difficult. For some, it almost feels like “What’s the point? I cannot control anything at the moment anyway! I am in survival mode right now.”
Fair enough. When our zone of influence shrank to choices like “Shall I cook a healthy meal or snack my stress away?” or “Shall I work from the bedroom or the kitchen today?”, thinking about anything longer-term might feel even harder than it usually is. To be able to imagine better futures, we need to be in the right state of mind. To be able to work towards this better future, we need agency. To understand that we need to change, we need to accept the current reality. That’s when the 3 Horizons Framework that futurists use to manage uncertainty is a useful approach to cope with the current situation. I described how to apply the framework to COVID-19 here; today, I am focusing on Horizon 1.
By applying the framework to the pandemic, we will have to accept that Horizon 1 — our “immediate” future, the continuation of the present (=lockdown or nearly lockdown) — will still go for a while. It is not a prediction. It is one of alternative futures (an unwanted future in this case) that we need to consider among other scenarios. When we accept that such a future is plausible, and given that this situation is new to us, it becomes clear that our priorities need to lie with building resilience and agency to make the best of the situation for as long as required. While we already start seeing weak signals of other futures (Horizon 3), resilience is a critical foundation for moving forward. And helping people build resilience is as much a job of a futurist, as is it to help people imagine different futures. So how can we boost our resilience?
Narratives
Futurists spend a lot of time sense-making. It is about giving meaning to our collective actions, especially in response to change. It helps frame the problem that we are trying to solve and take a position in relation to the problem. And this is when narratives play a critical role. Narratives that we hear, choose to listen to, and that we tell ourselves. They are important because our energy follows the narratives and shapes our future. Different narratives also require different levels of resilience.
With COVID-19, there is no lack of all kinds of narratives coming from the screens around the world. Here are a few examples.
1. Pandemic is a war. Many of the global leaders, including Australian Prime Minister Scot Morrison, use the narrative of the war: “Australia ‘will get through’ COVID-19 battle”. What does it mean for us? If there is a war, there is an enemy. If there is an enemy, we need to fight. We are looking for attributes of the war, and if we cannot find them (i.e. we cannot physically see the virus), we might start looking for enemy somewhere else. Is this the most useful narrative at the moment? I am not sure. Furthermore, this narrative will require more efforts to sustain resilience to cope with all the imaginary dangers that come with it.
2. Pandemic is someone’s fault. The US president Donald Trump also calls the virus a war but goes one step further. He calls it “our war against the Chinese virus.” While the geographical location is technically correct, the way this message comes through is extremely dangerous. The positioning of the pandemic as someone’s fault suggests there is someone to blame. If we focus on blaming others, we are just wasting our precious energy and complicating the situation even further.
3. Pandemic is a test. A different position is taken by the German president Frank-Walter Steinmeier, who is against tagging the pandemic a war. Instead, he is calling it “a test of our humanity” and saying that “we can be a society with more trust, more consideration and more confidence”. If the pandemic is a test, we need to pass this test; we need to transform to become better as a result of it. What does not kill us makes us stronger (=more resilient), but can it also make us smarter, more compassionate and more conscious? The narrative of transformation is more useful. It makes us ask ourselves: who do I want to be during and after the pandemic? It supports our resilience by focussing our efforts on what we can control and distracting us from gloomy thoughts on what we cannot control.
What narrative are you listening to? Does any narrative out there resonate with you? And if not, can you come up with another narrative that would be more useful for you personally? The narrative is “useful” if it clicks in your head and in your heart, and gives you a goal worth striving for. It could be anything from living your values throughout the pandemic, serving others, or making the best you can of the situation.
Hope
Once you have your pandemic goal or challenge articulated clearly, that’s when we can turn to hope. Hope is closely related to resilience as it helps to overcome obstacles that we face trying to achieve our goals. The research by the American psychologist Charles Snyder has shown that a higher level of hope corresponds with superior academic and athletic performance, greater physical and psychological well-being, and enhanced interpersonal relationships. In other words, people who are “more hopeful” are more likely to overcome challenges and to achieve their goals.
Now, you must be thinking: how can I become more hopeful? Luckily, researchers found the answer to that, too. They managed to translate the abstract concept of hope into the formula: Hope = Pathways + Agency, where pathways are different ways in which you can achieve your goal and agency is motivation to move along these pathways. This formula gives us ways to sustain resilience. Next time you feel giving up on your goal, ask yourself: where is it coming from? Is the goal not articulated clearly? Are you losing agency and confidence that you can achieve it? Has the pathway you have been on until now got blocked? Depending on what hinders your motivation, the ways to restore it would be different. Here are just a few ideas on how you can boost your agency and increase the number of pathways you can see.
Pathways
· List all possible pathways you can think of and regularly evaluate if you are on the easiest pathway towards your goal
· Learn from pathways that helped you succeed in previous steps of the journey. Is there anything you can apply again? Anything you can build on for your next step?
· Attribute failure to the action or strategy, not to yourself
Agency
· Always remember to recognise and celebrate your successes and how far you have come
· Ask for help, advice or encouragement from someone who you know would support you
· Enjoy the process (not the outcome), be playful and think positively — you will be able to recognise more pathways available to you.
As you can see from these components of the formula, hope is very different from optimism. Being confident that everything will be fine can be paralysing and preventing the needed action. Optimism makes us feel good (for some time), hope makes us create good (and make the difference in our lives).
Resilience is…
To sum it up, accepting that the current reality is our immediate future, choosing a narrative that is useful, setting up a goal or a challenge that is worth working towards, directs energy to constructive and creative thoughts and actions, whether they are focused on your own transformation or serving others throughout the pandemic time. These are the key elements to build resilience throughout the first of the Three Horizons of the pandemic. In the next post, I will continue unpacking the remaining horizons of this framework.
