My new book - bit by bit 1
Part 1: Introduction, Chapter 1, What, Why, How?
Hello everyone
This is Chapter 1 of Imagining our futures: The power of our worldviews and assumptions - it’s finished but still a draft, so please do keep the feedback coming by emailing me. Good, bad, not sure, all comments are very welcome. Chapter 2 coming soon.
Chapter 1: What, How and Why?
One of the biggest challenges to successfully imagining new futures is understanding our worldviews and the assumptions they construct in the present.
When I was 17 and in my final year of high school, I applied for a scholarship that would enable me to spend that year studying overseas. I was really looking forward to this year – I had imagined myself with a host family somewhere in the USA and assumed I would be successful. I wasn’t. This was the future I dreamed about, one that I was certain would eventuate. It didn’t. I was most upset.
‘The future’ is part of our lives. It is a temporal space that merges with the past and the present, and we plan for it every day. We think about it, sometimes with hope, sometimes with despair. We also hold an image of ‘the future’ in our minds that influences that thinking, our assumptions about the present, and our actions today – even if we do not consciously know we have this image.
The problem with accepting a single future as real as I did when I was 17 is that ‘the future’ does not exist. When any single ‘future’ fails to emerge as I had planned, we often experience an emotional response: sadness, hopelessness, anxiety, anger and even fear. And yes, being very upset. We might lose hope. Something we wanted did not eventuate, sometimes because the world changes around us and disrupts our plans, sometimes because what we really wanted to happen just did not eventuate. We are then faced with uncertainty and maybe even fear for ‘the future’. Our single future is disrupted, often gone forever. What to do now?
When our single future does not emerge as hoped, there are three lessons to be learned, which in hindsight, I learned the hard way:
future outcomes can never be predicted with any certainty, and we should never ‘bet the farm’ on one single future;
a longer-term, systems view (the changes around us) is essential because that will show you how bigger, interconnected and interdependent our worlds are, and most importantly;
maintaining hope is critical for finding our new futures in the present, but sometimes fate intervenes.
That scholarship I applied for and the future I lost? I bet the farm on this future, I was too young to understand the system I had entered and its associated forces but, thanks to my mother, I never lost hope. I was in the car with her just after I found out I didn’t get the scholarship and she said to me: Maree, don’t be too upset, there is something else in the future for you, you just have to wait for it. This was my first lesson in the power of thinking about futures beyond ‘the future’.
And my mother was right. The reality is that there are always multiple futures out there, just waiting for us to find them in the present. We lose one future and often grieve the loss, but there is always another future waiting for us to find if we are open to looking for it.
‘The future’ is an image, an idea, a hope, a belief, an assumption that is constructed by our worldviews to help us make sense of, and act in, our worlds today. It is a concept that is knowable today only when we make our images conscious, articulate them, and seek to understand where those images came from – that is, find and challenge our assumptions about futures, to avoid the risk that thinking remains constrained, invisible yet powerful in unconsciously shaping our decisions and actions today. We make the mistake I did and assume our desired future, our preferred future, will eventuate as planned. Unfortunately, sometimes fate intervenes.
When we make our tacit futures real, we begin to understand and accept why any single, assumed and espoused future is actually not all that useful in the present, especially if we believe that single future to be right and inevitable. This belief that somehow, we can control and manage ‘the future’ today is why organisations spend so much time defining their ‘preferred future’ and basing their strategic actions around their single future image. And it is why that strategy often fails. It's also why I was so upset when I put all my faith into one future that didn’t happen for me.
It’s also dangerous. Assuming a single future that it is based on unchallenged assumptions and also means that future generations and our responsibility for them today is not usually considered. When we think we can control ‘the future’ in the present or the short-term we are using the past and the present as our boundaries – because the only temporal space we can influence is the present. While we can imagine some futures, those images will be constrained by our unchallenged assumptions which ‘trap’ us in the present, a situation where we claim to be ‘surprised’ when our assumed future doesn’t emerge as we hoped.
A critical question when we imagine futures is: what can we do today to ensure whatever futures emerge do no harm to future generations, those for whom we are creating the conditions of their world today? Why? Because it is their futures our decisions and actions today influence and shape. Yes, we need to act today to let our current world emerge over time in sustainable ways but we also need our imaginations to take us out of the present into the realm of the new and novel. There is enough change around us now to know that the present is unlikely to move into a single future that we can define. The future is unknowable and our task today is to find new perspectives, new thinking and new actions.
From this point on, we will talk about futures in the plural since focusing on ‘the single future’ is distracting and pointless in our world today and simply doesn’t exist. For me, in a Futures Studies (FS) context, ‘the future’ no longer exists.[1]
Some background
My first contact with foresight was the day in late 1999 when the Vice-Chancellor at Swinburne University of Technology asked me to "do foresight" – a seemingly innocuous enough request at the time – but it turned out to be a tipping point in my career and my life. The first time I realised the impact of this request was a few years later when someone asked me why I was doing my job leading the integration of foresight approaches into Swinburne's strategy development framework. I replied:
I do it because it has let me see the world in a new way. I can't tell you exactly how, I can't write it down, but I know I see the world differently now. I know I think differently now. And I do it because I like doing it.
I said that off the top of my head which, as close friends know, is a very unusual thing for me to do. For me though, it was a bit like a lightning bolt had just jolted me – like the universe was sending me a message. Something deep inside me was changing. I just had to find a way to articulate this but at this point I didn’t entirely understand what was changing.
I had a similar experience when at the end of the first year of Master of Strategic Foresight course that I was studying at Swinburne University. We had to talk about a key takeaway from our first-year experience. From somewhere in my brain, searching for something to say that sounded valid, I said without thinking:
That we are responsible for future generations. That what we do today matters. That the future matters today.
I was a bit shocked again at my lack of thinking before speaking and then I thought about why I’d said those particular words. It is a statement that had moved from my unconscious to consciousness. It remains at the core of my futures thinking today and, to a large extent, this book.
A third experience was an assignment I did in the Strategic Foresight Master’s degree. I used the integral framework that I write about in Chapter x for two assignments - the first about my reflections on the integral futures unit we had just done and the second when I applied the integral four quadrants to the design of scenario processes. Peter Hayward told me in the first assignment that no one had ever used the integral quadrants to frame their reflections before which was surprising to me. "Why wouldn't you use it in a subject about integral theory?" I remember thinking. I realised then that I had been ‘integralised’ – my brain now thinks in quadrants, seeking to find the whole in everything I did.
Peter also told me that "I was onto something" in the second assignment when I explored how to use the four quadrants in the design phase of a scenario planning process to make our assumptions about futures visible. He also told me I wasn't quite there yet, and I am not sure I have worked it out yet! Here too was a mental shift where I realised my thinking and my assumptions about futures had changed.
I write about these personal experiences to demonstrate two things: one, that finding your foresight does not happen instantly or as a conscious outcome of a single FS process. It emerges over time as you make, sometimes force, your brain to think in new, more expanded ways that allow you to begin to challenge and let go of your once deeply held assumptions about futures. Eventually, you will be able to articulate the change in your thinking and this is when your foresight is becoming a conscious capacity. Two, because if we are to find new thinking, new perspectives, and new actions to influence the present, we need to first map as many of our individual, collective and organisational assumptions underpinning how we think about futures in the present as we can.
Why? Our thinking and underpinning assumptions – those formed by our worldviews – not only construct our ways of making sense of the world and our futures, they also constrain or open up opportunities for reframing the present and new actions for us and organisations. These assumptions constrain our imaginations and define what futures we accept as real and those we reject. Our individual and cultural assumptions and beliefs shape how we respond to change and influence decision making and action in organisations. They matter in the present - and finding and challenging them is critical if we able to escape the cognitive trap in futures work we find ourselves in today. The cognitive trap is constructed by our assumptions that we accept as true and right in the present. The sub-conscious ones, the ones we accept without challenge, and resist when they are challenged. They provide a mental model with which to operate in various contexts.
Why this book?
My first book – Foresight Infused Futures: A How to Guide for Using Foresight in Practice (2016)[2] – was about using foresight capacities in practice, existing frameworks, and tools that you can use to begin using FS approaches in organisations. This book also has a focus on foresight in the sense of how it allows us to imagine and nurture new futures in the present.
One of the biggest challenges to accepting and expanding our imaginations in the present is understanding the power of our worldviews and the assumptions they construct in the present. All images of futures are underpinned by assumptions, and finding and challenging those assumptions so we can reframe the present is perhaps the biggest collective obstacle we face if are to move beyond the constrained systems shaping these first decades of the twenty-first century.
I have been exploring how it is that we humans might be about to imagine new futures in the present and reframe and expand our perspectives – to allow new thinking that informs new actions in the present to emerge and expand. Doing this requires us to understand how and why we imagine futures as we do, to understand where our assumptions come from, articulate, and challenge them, and build the capacity to imagine futures that allow us to question the present in valuable and useful ways. Our starting point is our worldviews, which will be explored in Part 1.
I therefore moved my focus away from FS processes which is what I did when I was consulting, because I now consider assumption mapping comes before process. I believe that unless we have a way to surface, map and challenge our assumptions that inform our imaginations, thinking and actions today, we will continue to create used futures. Perhaps too, without expanded imaginations, the futures field might continue to struggle to be recognised by those whose minds are closed to the new and novel in the present and are trapped in their belief in data or the search for control and certainty in the present.
All this means, of course, that this is a book based on my worldview. I’m write as Maree, sharing my knowledge, ideas, and experience to focus on how to find and use our imaginations in new ways in our everyday thinking. That brings with it a set of my assumptions, and I’ll identify these in footnotes when I know they are at play. What I focus on is the relationship across our worldviews, assumption and our imaginations, viewed in a holistic way, to define a frame that hopefully ensure they can be made explicit in our FS processes.
Why? Ultimately, it’s because we need to become futures literate. I draw on a range of work about futures literacy when I write that we need to understand the assumptions that underpin our imagining about futures, what futures we accept and those we reject, and to also understand the types of futures we are creating when we use different assumption sets. Fundamentally though, I’m writing about the need to make our thinking about and imagining our futures a conscious capacity.
About the Book
People create futures which is why this book is about how we think, the constraints we impose on our imaginations, and what we usually unquestioningly assume about futures that shapes outcomes and actions today. Expanding and deepening our internal and external conversations about futures must begin by mapping our unquestioned assumptions so that new thinking, new perspectives, and new actions in the present can emerge. Remember, ‘the future’ does not exist in the present, it is unknowable and we can only influence the present.
In summary, our assumptions about the past, present and futures are part of our worldviews, and it from this unconscious space that our foresight capacities emerge once we open our minds and accept that the uncertain and the unknowable are useful in the present. Once we do that mapping, we begin to use our expanded futures thinking and imaginations in our futures processes. We will be consciously allowing our thinking to escape the constraints constructed by assumptions to find new perspectives and actions in the present.
We explore how understanding the connections across our worldviews, assumptions, and imaginations will enable us to move beyond the current, constrained thinking about futures that dominates futures thinking now. The latter type of thinking has little to do with allowing us to use our imaginations to their full capacity, and it doesn’t allow us to reframe the present by finding the new and novel. It also has little to do with ensuring we do no harm to future generations by our decisions and actions today. We aim not to ‘manage the future’ or predict and forecast, all of which keep our actions trapped in short-term thinking. We aim to find the new and the novel in the present.
With this book, I hope that I can contribute to expanding and deepening our futures thinking – that is, our imaginations. Part 2 explores how we might surface and challenge our assumptions in ways that demonstrate their power over our thinking, and that once mapped and made overt, both individually and collectively, can be challenged.
Book structure
I write this book in the way it is structured because it seems sensible to me, and because in many ways, it is a personal book. The framework also emerged from my PhD research and much of that content is the origin of this book. I’m not and never have been an expert, I’m someone who wants to leave behind a useful legacy of writing to help inform the FS field that also helps some people surface and apply their foresight capacities in their lives.
Thinking in new ways does hurt your brain, however, but I can say that once you have allowed yourself to break through your assumption walls - brick walls in your thinking - you will never be able to think how you used to think about futures again.
My first book – Foresight Infused Futures: A How to Guide for Using Foresight in Practice (2016)[2] – was about using foresight capacities in practice, existing frameworks, and tools that you can use to begin designing FS approaches in organisations. This book also has a focus on foresight in the sense of how it allows us to imagine and nurture new futures in the present while we also expand our scope to more overtly include imaginations.
Because much of the content in this book emerged from my PhD, it has 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 used it in practical ways. 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?
One of the biggest challenges to accepting and expanding our imaginations in the present is understanding the power of our worldviews and the assumptions they construct in the present. All images of futures are underpinned by assumptions, and finding and challenging those assumptions so we can reframe the present is perhaps the biggest collective obstacle we face if are to move beyond the constrained systems shaping these first decades of the twenty-first century.
I have been exploring how it is that we humans might be about to imagine new futures in the present and reframe and expand our perspectives – to allow new thinking that informs new actions in the present to emerge and expand. Doing this requires us to understand how and why we imagine futures as we do, to understand where our assumptions come from, articulate, and challenge them, and build the capacity to imagine futures that allow us to question the present in valuable and useful ways. Our starting point is our worldviews, which will be explored in Part 1.
I have now moved my focus away from FS processes which is what I did when I was consulting, because I now consider assumption mapping comes before process. I believe that unless we have a way to surface, map and challenge our assumptions that inform our imaginations, thinking and actions today, we will continue to create used futures. Perhaps too, without expanded imaginations, the futures field might continue to struggle to be recognised by those whose minds are closed to the new and novel in the present and are trapped in their belief in data or the search for control and certainty in the present.
All this means, of course, that this is a book based on my worldview. I’m write as Maree, sharing my knowledge, ideas, and experience to focus on how to find and use our imaginations in new ways in our everyday thinking. That brings with it a set of my assumptions, and I’ll identify these in footnotes when I know they are at play. What I focus on is the relationship across our worldviews, assumption and our imaginations, viewed in a holistic way, to define a frame that hopefully ensure they can be made explicit in our FS processes.
Why? Ultimately, it’s because we need to become futures literate. I draw on a range of work about futures literacy when I write that we need to understand the assumptions that underpin our imagining about futures, what futures we accept and those we reject, and to also understand the types of futures we are creating when we use different assumption sets. Fundamentally though, I’m writing about the need to make our thinking about and imagining our futures a conscious capacity.
There are three parts to the book. I still believe theory comes before practice, at least the first time around so Part 1 is the theory bit where we look at worldviews, assumptions, foresight and imaginations. Part 2 is the design of my Assumptions Mapping Framework, and Part 3 is about how to apply the Framework in practice.
I, of course, suggest that you start at the beginning and read sequentially so you can develop a big picture of what I am writing about, but if you are a busy person and just want the final part, go ahead.
[1] This may seem an extreme point of view. However, in a FS context, believing in the single right future that allows us to think we can predict futures is a side track we don’t need to, and shouldn’t follow. For me, predictions are the product of closed mind and trapped thinking.
[2] This book is now available for free download on Foresight in the Present.