Seeing What the Futures Hold

Humans are unique among animals for our ability to envision alternative futures and think about what might be required to realize them. This ability – known as prospection – is so unique, in fact, that some psychologists have argued that it might be the defining characteristic of the species. It’s an extraordinary capability, but it’s also one that we tend to undervalue and underutilize.

When most people envision the future, they imagine a fairly narrow range of possibilities – even when projecting years and years ahead. Rationally, we may know that change is often not linear and that the future we plan for is rarely the one we wind up with, and yet, our imagined futures tend to be heavily informed by past experience and an intuition of change that’s largely linear.

The challenge for organizational leaders is that focusing on the expected future – knowable, predictable, familiar – risks missing a wider range of plausible and possible futures that have to be seen before they can inform strategic decisions. And it could be that a preferred future exists in that broader scope and could be realized if we’re able to make the moves today to make that version of tomorrow more likely – to innovate in the right direction, so to speak. On the flip side, there might also be a future (or set of futures) that we’d really like to avoid and build resilience against, but to do either, we first need to be able to see those possibilities with clarity.

The upshot is that challenging some of our expectations and assumptions about the future actually affords us the opportunity to recognize and work with a wider field of possibilities for the longer term and to make better informed and more “futures-robust” strategic decisions today.