Why does the future fail?

The futures, as a compendium of multiple ideas, imagination and expectations, live in the head of individuals at the present time. It is defined by many elements that range from the individual lifestyle to cultural connotations and from social expectations to organisational behaviours. It is complex, and that is a good thing.

We anticipate many things for the future, for good and for bad. Anticipation helps us prepare for what is coming, and it makes society more resilient and adaptive to change. Today, we live in an era of hyper-accelerated change at many different layers encompassing elements like the environment, technology and society, to name a few. Everything changes, and everything changes faster than ever.

Although it might seem that we live in a collapsing world, we might be currently living in the best times for humankind in its history, as author Hans Rosling highlights in his book 2018 Factfulness, because things are better than we tend to think. We took huge leaps in hunger, equality, quality of living, health, mortality and natality rates, economic growth, and many more.

Some can argue that it is not enough, and there is a long way to go, which would be absolutely true. There is a long way in front of us, an array or brighter futures to explore that go deeper into many of today's issues, but all that was achieved in the past is still making the present the better time we currently have.

However, if today's is better than any time before, why is it not like the future we envisioned a few years or decades back? Why is the future failing us? It is probably an issue with us and not the future, so let's explore 3 key behaviours that might make us fall short.

Lack of understanding and thinking in systems

We live in an ecosystem. A network of interdependent elements that connect, trigger, and respond to other elements' stimuli and actions. There is no survival of elements outside the system, and the system survives because of its elements. It is a fragile and delicate feedback loop to keep everything working in balance.

As humans, we tend to underestimate the value of the systems and their interconnections. There is a whole field of study exploring complexity and systems thinking researching to understand systems' mechanics and patterns better.

As kids, we were exposed to systems through the cycle of water or the cycle of CO2 at school, and we tend to relate systems only with the ecosystem and the planet but not with our daily lives actions. However, as social individuals, we live in a system that guides our interactions, expectations, responses, and actions, and so do the governments, institutions and organisations we create. Indeed, it is a system of systems encompassing social, family and economic systems as a brief example.

When exploring or expecting the future to manifest, we tend to underestimate the systems that create the present. If we don't understand the systems to overcome, replace, and shift, then there would be little or no change because, as Donella Meadow puts in her book Thinking in Systems, the only goal of a system is to perpetuate itself.

You cannot make a system produce different results by replacing a piece but by substituting it with a new system. This is probably the key aspect of thinking, mapping, and understanding systems before exploring future alternatives. If we can comprehend the system's inner mechanics, then our actions to shift the output will be better focused, and, indeed, our expectations will align better with future results.

Lack of anticipatory and imaginative thinking

We tend to rush to the future. We go as fast as possible to yield some results in whatever matter we care about. If not thinking in systems was the first failures we made to build the future, the lack of anticipation is probably the second key aspects.

Anticipation is biological. It helps to foresee things to come given an array of signals or stimuli that precede an event. There are different types of anticipation, and they relate in many different ways to the future, as Riel Miller and others exemplify in their book Transforming The Future. However, here I will explore an anticipatory system that helps us do well, or bad, in our daily lives: the human brain.

A brain is basically an anticipation machine. It receives a stream of real-time data points from sensory inputs, goes through a series of neural networks, predicts the next data point, and if the prediction is correct, it repeats the process with the next data point; however, if the prediction is wrong, it raises attention in the individual for an opportunity to learn and construct a new response.

This model of brains as anticipation machines was proposed by Marvin Minsky in his textbook The Society of Mind, where he tries to understand the underlying system inside the brain to explain reasoning, imagination, and anticipation.

The key element in an anticipatory system is learning and constructing responses to new stimuli. It is a good mechanism to adapt to novelty, but it might lack a system to rewire previously learnt responses. Sure this is the best way to minimize energy consumption, but it also prevents us from changing existing behaviour while endlessly repeating old patterns.

Building a new pattern takes time and energy. It implies rewiring the system in new ways at different layers, and we tend to avoid it unconsciously by automatically triggering learnt responses. Being aware of this helps to re-evaluate our own thinking and consciously activating the mechanism to influence our unconscious: imagination.

Today, imagining new futures is extremely difficult given the lack of time or, best said, the urgency for delivery. If there is a rush to produce something, there would be very little anticipation and imagination. We tend to forget that the future takes time to develop. Something we consider to be extremely new and prevalent in the present time has been there already for decades, slowly evolving to create what we see today. Have a read to this article in The New Yorker in 1981, written by Jeremy Bernstein, titled "A.I." where he explores the state-of-the-art of artificial intelligence and creates a profile of Marvin Minsky, the father of the discipline. Although it was written 40 years ago, it stills relevant and very similar to the articles occupying major media today on the same topic.

We don't allow the time for the future to mature.

Anticipatory and imaginative thinking about the future explores the present to search for already nurtured responses and new stimuli that still need a response. It is a rewiring process that helps to imagine alternatives beyond the usual suspects in every sector.

Lack of adaptation to emerging change

We don't like change.

Change disrupts normality and forces our bodies to think for new responses, reactions, models, behaviours, patterns, or solutions. It consumes energy, and as we said before, our brains are effectively minimizing energy consumption. Change is inevitable, so there should be a mechanism to adapt to it naturally.

In nature, change is constant. It is considered the cornerstone of Darwinian evolution, and it should be relatively easy to solve biologically. First, let's emphasize that any biological species' goal is to survive and carry its genetic information forward over time, so the mechanisms to cope with change in this situation could be reduced to basically two: immortality and reproduction.

In the first case, immortality is the option to thrive in the future if the context remains constant. When there is no alteration in the resources, stimuli, and interactions, there is no need to adapt to new environments, and the previously learnt patterns still valid. In this situation, no new learning happens. No new responses are needed; species remain intact, just living forever until an external event disrupts the system and is replaced by something different while all the inner elements disappear.

On the other hand, if the context changes frequently, the best option for eternity is reproduction. Resources, stimuli, and interactions change due to different motives and interactions between them or external elements. There is a constant need to not only evaluate novelty but also previously learnt patterns. In this situation, any previous experience might be counterproductive, so the chosen mechanism is to produce offspring that develops a new response to the stimuli. This option helps to adapt to change and move forward to eternity.

In today's world, we are choosing one of the two options too. We do it at the individual, organisational, and institutional levels. Each of them is a system made of systems, and we decide what approach to take to move it towards the future.

In some cases, given a privileged position, we might decide to opt for immortality - not adapting to change or assuming the context will not change our position. Although it is often overused, this was probably the case of Nokia vs Apple and the mobile device industry' transition. Obviously, it is easy for smaller organizations to adapt to change as they don't usually need to maintain structures created for past issues.

In some other cases, we might decide to opt for reproduction - adapting to change by generating new offspring better equipped to survive in the current context or paradigm. One good example of this might be Patagonia and its approach to recycling, repairing and minimizing the use of resources; they've been anticipating emerging change and readapting internally to respond to external factors. There are many examples of intrapreneurship in governments, organizations, labs, and some startups and grassroots movements that emerge to better adapt to the current environment.

And you? What do you think might be making the future fall short to our expectations? Are there any key elements we might need to be wary about?