4 What is imagining about?
Expanding and deepening our futures thinking and imaginations
When I was seventeen 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 seventeen is that ‘the future’ does not exist. When any single ‘future’ fails to emerge like I had planned, we often experience an emotional response: sadness, hopelessness, anxiety, anger and even fear. And 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. Unfortunately, our desired futures don’t come to fruition when fate intervenes. We are then faced with uncertainty and maybe even fear for ‘the future’. Our single future is disrupted, often gone forever. Or is it?
That scholarship I applied for and the future I lost? I ‘bet the farm’ on this future, I was too young to understand the complex social 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 (of course). We lose one future, and we should grieve its loss, but there is always another future waiting for us to find if we are open to looking for it in the present.
‘The future’ is but 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 not a tangible construct but created in our minds by our worldviews and assumptions. But ‘the future’ doesn’t exist, it is unknowable today. We can, however, articulate our images about futures and make them conscious, available for sharing. We can also begin to understand where those images came from – that is, finding and challenging our assumptions about futures. We need to do this so we can avoid the risk that our futures thinking remains constrained by the current present, invisible yet powerful in unconsciously shaping our decisions and actions today.
When we collectively articulate our assumptions and the images they create, we can begin to understand - and accept - why any single, assumed and espoused ‘future’ is not all that useful in the present, especially if you believe that single future to be right and inevitable. This belief some of us hold that somehow, we can control and manage ‘the future’ today is why organisations spend so much futile time defining their ‘preferred future’ and basing their strategic actions around their single future image. Then they wonder why that strategy often fails, and why futures processes sometimes have little impact. It’s also why I was so upset when I put all my faith into one future that didn’t happen for me.
While ‘the future’ doesn’t exist, it is a temporal space that is intertwined with the past and present. They are a package, and likely why we think we can control the future”. It’s here, we talk about it all the time, we plan for it, based on our knowledge today.
Assuming, either consciously or unconsciously, that we can manage ‘the future’ in the present immediately constrains our cognitive boundaries and the scope of our imaginations. Using conscious foresight addresses the three things that shape this sort of poor futures thinking and limited imaginations: the ‘future’ doesn’t exist, it is unknowable in the present, and the only temporal space we can influence is the present.
In some ways then, it is not our images of our futures that matter, it is what we do with them in the present. Good scenario development focuses not on the images constructed by people, but rather on the conversations about them that follow. The ones that break open our thinking and enable us to find new action are what we seek - those which overtly address the social challenges we face today to reframe the present, not seek to sustain the present.
How our futures emerge over time is influenced by our thinking and actions in this present moment. Every decision today matters. When we recognise that, we can start to become good ancestors for future generations. Futures processes using conscious processes can provide us with new lenses, rather than keeping trapped in a present that we know is unhealthy for both humans and the planet. To free ourselves from thinking that we can control our futures is the aim, and finding new perspectives, new thinking and new actions today - to reframe the present
You will notice by now that I’m using the term ‘futures’ more the ‘the future’. A focus on a single assumed futures which does not exist is distracting and pointless in our world today. For me, in a Futures Studies context, ‘the future’ should no longer exist.
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