Ready, Empowered, and Conscious: Practicing the Foresight Stool
“Future proofing” is an outdated relic
Long before the recent surge in foresight’s popularity, the phrase “Future Proof” had been a staple of organizations and governments around the world. The idea of “Future Proofing” is to use the methodologies of foresight and futures thinking as a way to minimize risk; develop plans for securing relevance in the face of disruptive forces; and support efforts to centralize, quantify, predict, and mollify the future.
There’s only one problem with the idea of Future Proofing – it doesn’t work! In our current global environment of systemic upheaval, constant convulsion of what is considered “the norm,” and a re-writing of our long-standing narratives – commonly known as the “polycrisis” or “metacrisis” – there is no return to “the way things have always been done.” Increasingly, the belief that the wild, the weird, the provocative, and the preposterous are unlikely realities – “that will NEVER happen” – is a mental relic from an outdated era. (Truth be told, it was always a fallacy of comfort, safety, and a desire for constant certainty; life itself is characterized by the wild, the weird, the provocative, and often the preposterous. Those who learn to embrace these life-giving qualities are rewarded with untapped possibilities and potentialities that transcend our well-worn experiences.)
Future Proofing is our current linear and mechanistic system’s attempt to domesticate foresight, employing it as a means to safeguard the status quo in the face of an unfamiliar world, but a new landscape requires a new way of measuring. This is foresight and futures thinking’s real superpower – to uncover the emerging novelty and transformational realities that produce greater expressions of life. In order to activate this superpower, we need a more holistic and healthy picture of foresight, one that has the ability to take us beyond the antiquated practices and models of our organizations, governments, and social structures.
If the suggestion that foresight isn’t simply a booster shot for those traditional models sounds unfamiliar to you or challenges your view of the practice, then I hope you will seriously consider what we might call the “Foresight Stool.” Each leg demonstrates the evolutionary application of futures thinking on our collective relationship with a world that seems more uncertain every day, but even more importantly, all three legs work in tandem to produce foresight that is healthy, whole, and generative. Remove one leg, and the practice of foresight is again incomplete, diminished, co-opted, corrupted, and possibly even dangerous!
Future Ready
“How can we make sure that we have what it takes to weather the approaching storm? Are we poised to take advantage of the emerging issues in business and society? Are we best positioned to seize on the promising opportunities that align with our strengths, while navigating through the disruptions that could capsize our viability? Are we future fit?”
These questions should sound very familiar to organizations that have engaged in futures thinking work, and this is the leg of our stool that represents the development of foresight skills and methodologies. This approach is obviously important, but many individuals who practice foresight operate solely from this leg. When this happens, we tend to develop a focus that looks at the world from the “inside-out” instead of the “outside-in.” An inside-out perspective sees foresight as a way to measure an institution’s well-worn area of concern (“What’s keeping the leadership awake at night?”) and secure the operating system for the long-haul, but will fail to stretch the organization into areas of concern that they are unaware of or blinded to.
This is what might be known as the “push of the future,” defining foresight as an exercise in intentionally managing the trends and emerging issues that are pushing us into the future whether we like it or not. From this vantage point, the future is filtered through our dominant narratives where only the strong, fit, and ready among us will survive and thrive. (At TFSX, the Future Ready leg off the stool aligns with the Natural Foresight® Framework.)
Future Ready can be defined as the tools, methods, and skills of foresight and futures thinking ensure that our organizations are not only prepared to meet the challenges that exist in an environment of change and disruption, but also grant us the ability to recognize untapped possibilities.
To be Future Ready is to utilize foresight as an “immune system” to see new perspectives, illuminate unexpected implications, test possible outcomes, and make smarter decisions every day.
Future Empowered
To be Future Empowered is to embrace foresight as a critical feature within the people, purpose, and practice of any community, and to encourage the exploration of alternative ways of doing and being as a means to ever-evolving generative impact. Future Empowered firms intentionally build the intrinsic competency of futures thinking which allows for the ongoing discovery of novel ideas, untapped potential, and pathways of dynamic flourishing that are often hidden within the organization’s DNA.
This leg of the foresight stool encompasses the entire spectrum of the future, from “push” to “pull,” but flips our attention from an inside-out to an outside-in perspective. This reoriented focus moves us away from a primary goal of attempting to ensure long-term entrenchment and success for the dominant narratives within our organizations, governments and societies, and reframes foresight as an organic mindset and practice that uncovers transformational capabilities and higher order purpose.
When we look at the world from a much broader, holistic, and integrated vista, we begin to expose the assumptions, biases, shortcomings, immaturities, gaps, and flaws in our systems that must naturally transform in order to be relevant and generative.
This empowerment – a manifestation of embodying the currently popular concept of futures literacy – shifts us from being framers to imagineers, innovators to inventors, commanders to collaborators, sustainers to regenerators, separators to entanglers, colonizers to democratizers, and fearful cynics to awe-inspired visionaries.
Many who are invested in “the way things have always been done” may hope to stop at Future Ready, but that’s not how futures thinking works. Foresight isn’t an add-on that serves to up-scale our traditional methods of business, governance, or civilizational development; by its very nature, it challenges the efficacy and existence of all that we think and do. Those who also embrace a Future Empowered perspective venture beyond the reductive idea of employing trend analysis for making the best strategic decisions, realizing that a world of ever-increasing uncertainty and ambiguity redefines the “what, why, and so what” of life as we’ve known it. (At TFSX, the Future Empowered leg of the stool aligns with the Wicked Opportunities® offerings.)
Future Conscious
If being Future Empowered reframes new ways of thinking about the future (as well as the past and present) in order to reframe wicked problems and cultivate unique opportunities, Future Consciousness fosters new ways of collective being and becoming that allow humanity to perceive and align with emerging realities so as to participate in the evolutionary co-creative process.
Futures thinking is much more than a discipline, or a set of tools and skills; it’s a biological, psychological, and sacred dynamic of all living things that unlocks the capability to practice imaginal anticipation, develop a more holistic vision that perceives healthy emergence, and fosters the co-creation of transformational realities. To be Futures Conscious is to embrace a deeper way of thinking, feeling, sensing, and intuiting the larger story all around us, and to dive into a process of “becoming” that experientially transcends the limitations of time and space.
This leg of the foresight stool moves us past the idea that the future is a time to prepare for or a place to aspire to, but rather a transcendent experience that we can cooperatively manifest. This is a state of revelatory sense-making, recognition of novel emergence, and the unfolding of transformational realities just waiting to be birthed. When we begin observing the cosmos through the eyes of cooperative creative complexity rather than seeing it as chaos that we must order (or, as some might believe, peacefully surrender to), we shift from being ready for, fighting against, or gaining control over what’s to come, to co-creating the unique and undiscovered nature of the future.
Futures Consciousness posits a change in our cosmological narrative from being “separate but connected” to one that sees “the whole as a unique entity,” unlocking our collaborative capability to display anticipatory behavior.
More than a collective skill, embracing the Future Conscious approach tracks along the evolutionary arrow from competition to cooperation, ultimately manifesting a human trait and a larger “cosmovision” that liberates us from the limited thinking of dominant narratives and systems. Once we embody this leg of the foresight stool, we come to understand that foresight is much more than an important skill to learn and leverage; it’s a critical element in continuing the human story. (At TFSX, the Future Conscious leg of the stool aligns with the philosophy of Holoptic Foresight Dynamics®.)
As you can see, the foresight stool acts as a metaphor for integrating the skills, activation, and philosophy of futures thinking, each component necessary for healthy foresight practice. We hope this brief explanation of how foresight can take us far beyond preparing for the next crisis or predicting the next disruption will inspire you to bravely journey into the unknown, and to take as many with you as possible.
