Future craft I: We all work with the future
Why we should not work with the future
We are beings that are constantly navigating the future - the near future, the medium and far future are always present in what we do. We plan, scheme, hope, fear and engage in thinking about the future on a personal as well as professional level. It seems self-evident, then, that we would want to be thoughtful about how we do this, but paradoxically we often find that we do not have the time to think about anything else than “what's next?”.
For the sake of argument, though, we should lay out the argument against working with the future before we begin. And we should try to make it as strong as possible - and provide you with a steelman version of what working with the future is less helpful, or even a waste of time.
The first step in that argument is to point out how often we are wrong when we try to assess the future. Predictions, forecasts, bets, scenarios often all fall short of what then really happens - and so what is the use of trying to work with the future, when the best thing you can do is to develop an adaptive set of skills that allow you to really take whatever comes in stride? The future, we might say, is too uncertain for it to be worth it trying to plan or understand it in any greater detail.
The second step in this argument is then to explain why this is the case – and here we end up with an important observation: the world is a very, very complex place, and that complexity makes it really hard to have any coherent views about the future. Technology, social systems and interconnected networks all combine to create such complexity, and such resulting uncertainty, that any work with the future is bound to be little more than astrology with fancy models.
The third step is to say that working with the future rarely translates to any actionable insights. We can say things like “demography is destiny, and the changing demographic patterns will impact the future” - but what edge does that really give us? What kind of action can we take on the basis of that? Even if we do get the future right, it rarely helps us decide anything of significance in the present.
And then, to finish off our argument, we can say that there are no examples of firms that have really been able to consistently draw on futures work to build an advantage - and that any evidence of a company benefiting from futures work is anecdotal or accidental: the example of Shell predicting the oil crisis is remarkable because Shell did not really benefit from it in the long run – every company regresses to the mean, even if it was lucky once in matching a change that others did not anticipate.
All of these criticisms are valid and important, but they do not dissuade us. The reason is simple: even if we say that we do not work with the future, we do. It is a question of being explicit about the way we do it - and possibly learn from our mistakes - or doing it implicitly and without any shared learnings in the process. There simply is no example of a purely reactive firm just muddling through – even those companies that make decisions to incrementally adapt have a view of the future, and work form that view to make their decisions. We are hardwired that way, and cannot help it.
What working with the future is not
Another problem we run into quickly when speaking about working with the future is that there is a lot of fuzziness to this term. Working with the future, as we think of it, is a methodological and falsifiable practice - the work is possible to evaluate and value, and you can be better and worse at it. That means that fuzzy trend oracles and loosely visioning futurists often fall outside of the scope of the kind of activity that we have in mind.
Since the future is so important to us, it does attract all kinds of people, with all kinds of claims. You can even make a niche out of constantly making the same doomsday prediction (on the hypothesis, we presume, that at some point it will come true), or by every year launching a new term, trend or forecast that is never evaluated. This is not helpful to those of us who think that there is real value in working carefully with the future, and it is not helpful to you who want to figure out how to build what we want to call “a future edge” - and this also provides us with a way to distinguish future work from future play.
The future edge
One way to distinguish what we are interested in and believe is valuable from a lot of other future oriented activities, is to think about “the future edge”. This is simply the advantage that your work with the future should give you, in discovering options, bets and strategies that will give you an ability to compete effectively with others in your field or build a more unassailable position.
In the first case, the future work you do should help you find actionable insights that can be translated into concrete business decisions, or help make existing business decisions better by some margin. The work you put in exploring the future in different ways will, if you do it well, present a number of possible strategic pathways, or clarify the value of such pathways, in a way that makes it possible for you to get this edge.
In the second case, your strategic aim with your future work is slightly different and your view of strategy is probably also different. Here, you focus on possible weaknesses and vectors of attack in your own position, and build them out with directed efforts. This more defensive stance is helpful in especially uncertain and volatile fields, where the age-old truth of the Sun Zi applies: you can never guarantee victory, but you can make your own position unassailable, and then wait for the mistakes of your enemy. Working with the future to build a robust position, and to explore possible mistakes your competitors may make is an often underestimated way of approaching our field.
In the best case, the future edge you build can be thought of almost as a bet that you have uncovered through the work. If so, you should explore it carefully and record it, make it or not, and then learn from the outcome. Such bets are important to formulate clearly and crisply, and we will often come back to this – future work is valuable only to the extent that it is so clear as to allow some action to be taken on the basis of the work. It does not have to have absolute precision - Aristotle’s reminder to ask of each thing the precision it allows holds here as everywhere else - but it needs to be precise enough to be actionable.
A key failure mode is a great future study that is impossible to translate into any kind of decision or action. We have each been caught in this failure mode, and it is frustrating because the validity of the future insight seems so clear, but the “so what” is missing completely. Look out for this in your own work!
Working with the future implicitly or explicitly
Finally, a reminder – we all work, as we said in the beginning of this chapter, with the future. We do so from a series of explicit assumptions, models and insights or we do so implicitly and often individually. This latter mode of working risks ending up with different implicit futures crashing, negating good work or creating unnecessary complexity across all of your projects.
Even if your work with the future stops with articulating a joint team view of the future, you will have avoided that risk, and almost surely guaranteed more coordinated decision making, and hence greater impact of the work you do.
So, why not give it a try?
Lessons
We all work with the future, implicitly or explicitly. Ensuring that there is some shared understanding is key to more sustainable successes.
All the efforts you put in working with the future should produce some kind of edge - defensive or offensive - for your organization or yourself.
It is important to meet the often motivated skepticism about working with the future up front and openly admit that there are good and bad ways to do this work.