Nothing ages faster than the future

The human psyche can tolerate a great deal of prospective misery, but it cannot bear the thought that the future is beyond all power of anticipation.

As for the future, your task is not to foresee it, but to enable it.

The business community focuses on managing uncertainty. That’s actually a bit of a canard. In an increasingly turbulent and interconnected world, ambiguity is rising to unprecedented levels. That’s something our current systems can’t handle.

There’s a difference between the kind of problems that companies, institutions, and governments are able to solve and the ones that they need to solve. Most big organizations are good at solving clear but complicated problems. They’re absolutely horrible at solving ambiguous problems — when you don’t know what you don’t know. Faced with ambiguity, their gears grind to a halt.

Uncertainty is when you’ve defined the variable but don’t know its value. Like when you roll a die and you don’t know if it will be a 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, or 6. But ambiguity is when you’re not even sure what the variables are. You don’t know how many dice are even being rolled or how many sides they have or which dice actually count for anything. Businesses that focus on uncertainty actually delude themselves into thinking that they have a handle on things. Ah, ambiguity; it can be such a bitch.

The future is rational only in hindsight.

Imagining the future is a kind of nostalgia.

Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language.

He who controls the past controls the future, and he who controls the present controls the past.

Any prediction about what is in fact to come, when cast as fiction, runs the risk not just of being wrong but of being not about the future at all.

In my view, futurism (“strategic foresight,” “scenario planning”) is a vaccination for our civilization’s immune system. It strengthens us. By introducing us to different possible futures, we become sensitive to those potential outcomes, and able to recognize their early signs. We can think about how we would respond to different futures, and argue about what would be desirable *before* it happens… if it happens. That “if” is important. Most of the forecast futures *won’t* happen, and even the “real” future won’t look exactly like our scenarios. It will have bits and pieces from multiple forecast futures, and some items that we didn’t catch. We’ll still be surprised by some things.

It turns out that planning for a set of different possible futures is a good way to prepare, even if the real future is different. There’s usually enough overlap, enough “economies of scope” allowing plans and solutions built for one issue to be effective for another. And even when reality takes us by surprise, the very act of thinking about, preparing for different futures gives us a better perspective. We’re more attuned to how seemingly unrelated factors can combine, leading to novel outcomes. We’re sensitive to the power of contingency. Diversity of ideas strengthens us; we’re more flexible and adaptive. We can’t let ourselves get trapped by thinking about just one future.