Why it’s Crucial to Build a Healthy Relationship with the Future

From 2022–2023, I served as the futurist in residence at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF), embedded in the Pioneering Ideas for an Equitable Future team. Over the course of my residency, I worked with the team to spot emerging trends related to health equity, kick the tires on numerous tools, and consult with program staff across the foundation about the futures they are working with their grantees to make real.

A signature focus of the research I conducted in dialogue with the team was understanding methods and philosophies for foresight and future-making that emphasize belonging, justice, and creativity. This work is very much in line with the Foundation’s recent public commitment to focus on structural racism as a barrier to health in America. Below, I share key lessons from my residency, and a wealth of related resources that I hope will continue to be useful for those both inside and outside of RWJF seeking to envision and manifest healthier and more equitable communities, families, and knowledge systems.

Signals of the future are all around us. Every day, we see another story about the ways in which technology and artificial intelligence are reshaping our world. Innovations in high tech medicine and diagnostics, deepfakes and synthetic media, brain reading, life extension and regeneration are each mind-boggling. Together, they are nearly incomprehensible, interacting in rapid and unpredictable ways.

Everyone seems to be constantly asking: What’s in these evolving trends for me and my work? But more often, it seems, we should be asking the questions: Who is developing these technologies? Who are they being developed for? What are the trade-offs? What do they mean for our organizations, for the philanthropic field, or for those facing structural racism?

Many of our institutions operate in the context of the short-term, in crisis mode, or in the three-to-five year strategic planning mode, as if the next few years are immune from the instability of the present and recent past. Taking the time to contemplate different future possibilities can help us orient more positively to the outcomes we want to see and our organizations’ roles in bringing them about.

Of course, getting into right relationship with the future can be difficult, given the lingering twin-demics of sadness and burnout from the last few disruptive years. Riven by division and random violence, it’s too easy for Americans to succumb to bleak Black Mirror-style leak visions. Lack of hope has real consequences: Some people are deferring child-bearing for fear of a burning planet, while others, as The Atlantic reports, may have given up on humanity altogether.

As an antidote, the practice of futures thinking can provide a set of tools to help us explore multiple possibilities, manage risk, exercise optimism, become more resilient in the face of uncertainty, and examine paths toward an equitable tomorrow.

Why does this matter?

You may wonder: When many of us are busy to the point of overwhelm, why take the time to contemplate things that have not even happened yet — or may never will?

Well, first of all, we’re already doing so — just in ways that don’t always serve us. We’re drowning in futures: weather and election forecasts, fears and fantasies about automation, the harmful conspiracy theories clogging up our social media channels. But most of us lack the time or tools to sift the more relevant prognostications from those that are noxious or designed to maintain the grip of those already in power.

That’s why the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has declared futures literacy an “essential competency for the 21st century,” which “empowers the imagination, [and] enhances our ability to prepare, recover and invent as changes occur.” We need to see futures literacy as a competency, just like media literacy or financial literacy, to operate in this volatile world.

Secondly, learning to imagine futures in which we can all thrive goes hand-in-hand with reframing humanity’s prospects for survival and the role philanthropy plays in it. What about elevating futures, for example, that prioritize slowness and mending over the “move fast and break things” startup ethos?

When people can picture the futures they yearn for and need, they are more motivated to work towards them. Hope can serve as a driving force that propels people to take meaningful action, collaborate with one another, and seek innovative solutions to pressing challenges. While this might sound naive, author Rebecca Solnit makes a distinction between hope as a personal feeling and the hopeful spirit needed for collective action: “Hope is not happiness or confidence or inner peace, she writes, “it’s a commitment to search for possibilities.”

How to build a healthier relationship with the future

So, what would it take to repair our society’s dysfunctional relationship with tomorrow and together imagine futures that are more humane and equitable? Working with my research team at Dot Connector Studio, we arrived at three main guiding principles: Widening the circle, putting up guardrails, and expanding methods.

1) Widen the Circle

Building a healthier relationship with speculation requires opening up the aperture to invite perspectives from those whose voices have been systematically excluded.

In practice, this means that to develop a healthy relationship with the future, we must be asking these questions:

• Who is imagining, driving, and deciding these futures?
• Who will benefit from these futures? Who will lose?
• What are the trade-offs and for who?

All too often, “progress” and “the future” are pre-colonized by the predictions of Western scientists, business leaders, policymakers, and other elites who many people often believe automatically. What if we regularly sought out a broad spectrum of futures, informed by hopes, knowledge, and life experiences different from our own? Engaging people through methods that invite them to take part in the exercise, not just consume information and be overwhelmed, can also open the door to fresh thinking.

Here it’s also important to understand that social change work is a form of speculative thinking — all of us have futures that we’re trying to achieve whether we articulate it this way or not. Advocacy organizations, mutual aid initiatives, and others not doing formal foresight, but working towards an equitable and healthy vision of the future are also doing vital futures thinking. As author and organizer adrienne maree brown notes, “All organizing is science fiction.” In other words, imagining and preserving space for all people in the future is futuring.

In looking across the horizon, both Dot Connector Studio and the Pioneering Ideas for an Equitable Future team have sought out marginalized future thinkers trying to reset the frame, such as those practicing Afrofuturism, Indigenous futurism, queer futurism, and more. In these approaches there’s often a focus on igniting hope, liberation, and joy, and making alternate worlds more realizable.

In Wired, C. Brandon Ogbunu explains, “Why do we care about what the Afrofuturist has to say? And why would we suspect that their answers would differ from that of an average futurist? It is because the Black experience is defined by a historical struggle for existence, the right to live, to be considered a person, to be afforded basic rights, in pursuit of (political, social, economic) equality. Because of this, the Afrofuturist can see the parts of the present and future that reside in the status quo’s blind spots.”

Not seeking out a wide range of perspectives and creative insights about what might come next means missing both major opportunities to avoid harm and flag obstacles to equitable transformation. Co-creating futures with those most impacted by harmful policies and structures — or giving unrestricted funds for such communities to do their own futures thinking — can help those in philanthropy seeking social change to solve complex problems. There are many possible futures being imagined worldwide. Solutions to wicked problems may already be out there waiting to be shared.

During my residency, I worked with the Foundation to explore ways to welcome visions from people who span a wide range of identities, genders, races, geographies, sexualities, class positions, heritages, abilities, and political leanings. Here is a set of organizations that are approaching futures thinking from various perspectives, such as the Black Speculative Arts Movement or the Initiative for Indigenous Futures.

2) Put up Guardrails

The second principle is “Putting up Guardrails,” which we conceptualized as actively thinking about the values and implications of your futures thinking. It’s fun to wonder what comes next, but it’s not meaningful without thinking through consequences.

Imagine the future as a highway: on one side is the yawning maw of despair; on the other is what economists call “irrational exuberance.” Guardrails protect us from these excesses, keeping our eyes forward so we can better navigate what’s rushing towards us. They protect us from ourselves, and by extension, from hurting others if we spin out of control.

Another way to think about guardrails might be to ask if the ideas you’re considering have the potential to either cause or deepen harm. This might involve taking the time to consider a more nuanced array of options. In a useful framework for “protopia futures,” Monika Bielskyte and collaborators note: “Both science fiction and corporate foresight visions directly influence reality, and their predominantly dystopian/utopian stereotypes more often than not limit our understanding of the possibility space of tomorrow’s choices.”

As an example of how to counter these tendencies, during my residency I attended an online course led by science fiction author Margaret Atwood called Practical Utopias. She mirthfully led the class through the process of jointly writing more positive scenarios to grapple with climate change. Not just wishful thinking, these were informed by solutions already developed by real-world social innovators such as those documented by Project Drawdown. By tying speculation to existing examples of solutions, participants kept themselves grounded and upbeat.

A related practice called “critical futures” as developed by Sohail Inayatullah involves asking hard questions that challenge the status quo, rejecting the notion that business-as-usual is the only way. In his article “Deconstructing and Reconstructing the Future” he recognizes that the realization of one reality inherently means that other realities and ways of doing or thinking are discounted or silenced.

What are often described as “broken” systems are systems that are actually designed to disenfranchise and marginalize. How can the safety and inclusion of disenfranchised communities become the first consideration when imagining futures? What are non-negotiable values? What ideas are not acceptable? Instead of using the past and present to visualize the future, how can existing power structures be disrupted? What needs to be restored, reimagined, abolished, transformed?

To help us all think more deeply about what it might mean to establish better guardrails, we’ve collected examples of more socially engaged forms of futures thinking. Consider, for example, the toolkit related to being a “good ancestor,” — long a tenet in indigenous cultures — or the Freedom’s Revival field guide authored by Mia Birdsong and Saneta deVuono-powell. In it, they surface methods and visions for imagining a future in which “freedom” is understood in a deeply interconnected way, “embracing the idea that our individual lives are enriched when our society cares for others.”

3) Expand Your Methods

Finally, bringing in other forms of experiential co-creation beyond the analytical trend-sensing of professional futurists can also help us to develop a more full-bodied appreciation of what different trajectories might mean. The burgeoning field of “design futures” engages artists, installation designers, media makers and others in creating tangible “artifacts from the future.”

Reading and writing speculative fiction is one very popular way to interrogate possibilities. Spending time in more life-affirming futures helps us reimagine the past and construct different possibilities. Afrofuturism is a key example of this, inviting us into worlds in which racism does not dominate. Other more inspiring genres include solarpunk, which “depicts visually bright and optimistic ecological utopias, often imagining a society where the climate crisis has been resolved or is being approached with camaraderie,” and hopepunk, a storytelling genre that frames hope “not as a brightly optimistic state of being, but as an active political choice, made with full self-awareness that things might be bleak or even frankly hopeless, but you’re going to keep hoping, loving, being kind nonetheless.”

How can we address and accommodate different learning styles, be more playful, and bring more tangible and hands-on aspects to the work? Games are one way to involve others in co-creating better futures, or at the very least imagining how to avoid worse ones. Artists too can serve as harbingers of futures that are not here yet, and spark contemplation.

Here we’ve collected examples of games, exhibitions, and speculative fiction that demonstrate a wide range of methods. Check out, for example, the widely used card deck called The Thing from the Future. Or dive into the work of Octavia Butler, whose science fiction has been cited as a prescient critique of the past few years in America—and then see books by Nnedi Okorafor to dream about what might come next.

While I created these collections of resources initially during this residency at Dot Connector Studio in 2022–2023, we’ll continue to update them as we find new examples. In the meantime, we’d love to hear from you.

What kinds of futures are you imagining? What tools and methods are you using? Feel free to share your thoughts below.

Jessica Clark is the executive director of Dot Connector Studio, and served as the Foundation’s futurist in residence from 2022 to 2023. The views expressed are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.