I intended to write a book on Imagining our Futures: The power of worldviews and assumptions and was two- thirds into the the first draft. Then life got in the way and as this post explains, I have moved away from writing a second book to a more open way of sharing my thinking about foresight now here on Foresight in the Present.
Some Background
My first book – Foresight Infused Futures: A How to Guide for Using Foresight in Practice (2016) was about using foresight capacities in practice, existing frameworks, and futures tools and approaches in organisations. This earlier book also had a focus on foresight in the sense of how it allows us to imagine and nurture new futures in the present. In hindsight, I was adding to a literature that views foresight as a process, and now I view foresight as a cognitive capacity.
I used ‘cognitive’ here as relating to how we think, reason and imagine – our conscious mental processes. One of the biggest challenges to deepening and expanding those processes in futures work is understanding the power of our worldviews and the unconscious assumptions they construct in the present. These are not new terms in futures work, but I did a ‘deep dive’ in my PhD on both areas which now underpins my thinking.
I have been exploring how it is that we humans might be about to surface these assumptions in particular, because every futures image is based on assumptions. The aim of this? To help us surface and articulate these assumptions, to challenge them for veracity in context, and to build the capacity to imagine futures that allow us to question the present in valuable and useful ways - and essentially reframe the present.
I believe that unless we have a way to do this – surface, map and challenge our assumptions about futures that inform our imaginations, thinking and actions today – we will continue to create used futures. Most futures processes use assumptions somewhere in the design, but I would argue that most don’t have a task that asks participants to delve deeply into their embedded assumptions, the ones that are unconsciously used each day to shape thinking and acting.
Personally, and this is a generalisation, I now think we no longer think about futures in meaningful ways in the present. We often abdicate our thinking to case studies, consultants – those experts! - and more recently to Artificial Intelligence (AI). We focus more on the external world of facts, trends and egos than the internal world of self and the cultural contexts in which we exist which is where assumptions are hidden. That is, we design futures processes to explore the external world and look for tangible proof that something is possible, controllable and manageable. We forget that it is our internal worlds that are concurrently and unconsciously assessing, interpreting, accepting or rejecting the images of futures that we are constructing in the present. The challenge is to recognise that this unconscious consideration of the present prevents us from imagining new future images and see the present through the new lenses we need to make sustainable change.
The reality is that processes without using foresight first as a cognitive capacity that is used both internally as individuals and externally as a collective, our futures processes will lead to low impact in the present. Why? Because now we separate the past and present from our futures, rather than seeing them as they are: co-existing, intertwined and interdependent in the present. We assess our future images using our present, unchallenged assumptions and our thinking about what we can change in the present remains constrained.
So what am I doing?
The core of my work here is the framework I have developed that allow us to find and explore the relationship across our worldviews, assumptions and how they shape our futures thinking, viewed in a holistic way. That framework is the Assumptions Mapping Framework (AMF) and is designed as a way to surface assumptions before, during and after futures processes.
Finding, expanding and deepening our internal and external assumptions about futures must begin by mapping them. If we don’t make these assumptions overt and shared, we won’t be able to think in new ways, accept new perspectives, and develop new actions in the present. We have to remember that ‘the future’ does not exist, it is unknowable, and we can only influence how we think and act in the present.
What’s next?
Because much of the content in Imagining our Futures emerged from my PhD, it’s a bit about theory, a bit about my thinking and a bit about practice. I was critiqued once for putting too much theory up front in my presentations, and I also once had to change a whole workshop series because I couldn’t convince my clients that participants needed to know what exactly foresight and FS were before they began to imagine new futures. Both times I couldn’t defeat their argument that the participants were busy people, and I just needed to tell them what they needed to do and how to do it. In the end, I adapted content to meet their needs. I knew at the time this compromise was going to constrain outcomes, but they were the client, yes?[1]
The Next Post
The next post covers the scope of what Imagining our Futures is about. I still believe theory comes before practice, Part 1 of this book is theory focused, Part 2 is focused on my mapping framework, and Part 3 is about using the framework in practice.
The next post will define those three parts that make up Imagining our Futures.