UPDATE July 23, 2020: Since this work was published in 2016, and with the Covid-19 pandemic, Future iQ has produced an updated article to be found at https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/importance-future-thinking-david-beurle/.
Wouldn’t it be great if we could know with certainty what was going to happen? We could make plans.
If you were planning a birthday picnic and you knew the weather would be sunny and hot, you could plan to have the picnic near water where the guests could play. You wouldn’t have to bother yourself over alternatives to manage the uncertainty of the weather. You wouldn’t need a Plan B for weather that wound up being cloudy and unseasonably cool or a picnic spot with shelter in case of rain.
What if we didn’t necessarily like what we knew was going to happen? Would we still prepare? Would we pretend it wasn’t going to happen? Would we be surprised when it happened? Would we be ready? What if you were enjoying your entrepreneurial lifestyle and the income you were generating when you were in a severe crash? The crash had you hospitalized for a month and rendered you unable to do the work you had been doing to make money.
Hard truth – we can’t know what will happen (whether it’s good or bad), not with certainty anyway. Predictions are illusions. Yet, we can still anticipate that things we like and things we don’t like could and will happen.
As the scale of change grows (beyond the personal), it affects more and more aspects of life, to the point where change can be global and still profoundly influence a locality. Those local changes can be perceived as both positive and negative.
Planning anticipates some of these changes. Individuals, businesses, and governments prepare for uncertainties. The various factors that create change are quite complex – the result is a high degree of uncertainty about the future. How does anyone prepare for the millions of changes that could happen? Or even the handful of changes that feel most significant?
Projections are one way we narrow the range of possible changes and thereby consider a more manageable set of possibilities. While projections can demonstrate the likelihood of change and make it possible to plan for that change, they can ignore important considerations for a plausible future and potentially leave us quite unprepared for what winds up happening. In other words, projections only tell part of the story. Wouldn’t you want to make the best possible decisions regarding the future and your preparedness for it? Wouldn’t you want the whole story?
This state of informed preparedness is precisely why future thinking is important. Future thinking anticipates changes because it considers the complexity of the vast web of factors that can influence the outcome of a decision. And it reduces uncertainty.
Future thinking may be informed by projections and other kinds of data analysis; however, the magic of future thinking is how it alters our perceptions of how certain decisions might play out. It prompts us out of our usual thought-box, even if we think we usually think out-of-the-box. When we get outside this box, we open ourselves to feel – it’s part of our perception shift. We might experience discomfort because we’re imagining something fearful, something we don’t want to happen. We should encounter this fear – a scary, imagined future could very well come to be – because it informs our decision-making in a very real way.
How can we prepare to respond to a plausible future with agility? Will we even be able to rally a nimble response? When change happens, will we know exactly what to do?
As we perceive plausible futures, we minimize uncertainty by enabling ourselves to consider how we might prepare for best, worst, and mixed outcomes. By having anticipated these outcomes, we are far more certain about how to respond than had we never explored the possibility before. This moment of decision-making is the beginning of strategic thinking, which leads to actions that help us navigate the unfamiliar terrain ahead.
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