Peering into the Future Is a Fascinating Business

 

Peering into the Future Is a Fascinating Business

By Jeffrey M. Bowen

Peering into the future is a fascinating business.  Humans seem uniquely suited for the task because, among all species, we are the only ones who actually contemplate the future.  Those who attempt to do this reside on a continuum.  At one end are planners who build pyramids of data-based assumptions.  At the other end are soothsayers and fortune tellers whose talents involve intuitive guesswork.  Somewhere in between live weather forecasters, poll takers, marketers, scientists, religious gurus, astrologers, science fiction writers, and most definitely politicians.       

  Taken together all these types extrapolate our minds and hearts into the unknown by building from what is known about the past and present.  A lot depends on what we want to do with the results.  My curious question is this:  When the past and future talk to each other, what do they really say?  

  Science fiction provides one entertaining answer.  The best writers of this genre have insisted that their work provides essential training for anyone who wants to peer at least a decade ahead.  I believe their creative freedom is the mother of invention.  For instance, more than 150 years ago, the French novelist Jules Verne built stories around electric submarines, helicopters, lunar modules, spoken newscasts, solar sails, tasers, and videoconferencing.  The basic technology for all of these existed back then, but Verne turned them into shocking possibilities long before inventors took out patents. 

 Another way to change the future is to rescript the past.  Historians and politicians, among others, share this strategy.  Historians revise their interpretations when they find new artifacts.  Politicians change past practices legislatively to gain power and control.  Thus heroes turn into villains.  Most recently, old statues become catalysts for protest as generational awareness and political agendas shift.      

My favorite strategy for tapping into the future is called futuring.  Unlike predictions which are usually calculated from statistical odds, and forecasts which are tied to specific time frames, futuring develops a bigger picture of broad possibilities.  It paints likelihoods that may change depending on the angle of view and the evolution of trends or changing events.  Originally conceived in the late 1940s as a Cold War gaming strategy, futuring has since become a popular planning strategy in the business world. Portraits of what may happen are enriched by technology. Different scenarios produce a composite of probabilities.

 I was introduced to futuring 50 years ago in a graduate course. Our group project was to describe what elementary and secondary education would be like today – that is, in 2020.    

We treaded through some familiar territory based on our awareness of developing issues such as nontraditional schooling beyond the classroom walls, better support for the disabled, and more responsive counseling services   Our foray into the future was more like short-term predictions extended from the status quo, and limited by the statutory mandates of the day.    

 In contrast, today’s fearless futurists think their way out of the box, and into worlds of internet-enhanced information and data, looking for curious trends, alternative scenarios, and trigger events.  They act more like generalists who scan different disciplines seeking connections among ideas that are novel and unusual.  Futuristic thinkers ask “what if” while remembering that the most specific predictions are probably the ones most likely to be wrong.

 The biggest challenge is to escape the past. When we plan into the future, psychologists tell us that much of our thinking stems from memories of our past.  Yet we gloss over the details in that past, so we may deceive ourselves and fail to learn what not to do in the future.  We also make that past much more predictable than it really was. Finally, survey research also confirms that, regardless of age, we believe that we have changed a great deal over the past 10 years, but that we will probably change very little over the next 10 years.  So we often rationalize the past and have real difficulty seeing ourselves in the long-range future.

Does this mean our attempts to fathom the future are wasted?  Not entirely, because, we benefit from certain advantages.  First, we are overwhelmingly social animals.  When we lack information about a future event, we become what psychologist Daniel Gilbert calls “surragators”.   We become much more willing to listen to and endorse the personal experience of others.  Indeed, futuring calls for collaborative thinking. 

A second advantage is that we are emotional beings.  The prospects of our future provoke strong reactions.  Psychologist Martin Seligman labels humans as homo prospectus because his research has confirmed that we spend enormous amounts of time recombining and retouching our past to imagine the future.  This helps us cope with novel situations, and deal with the unexpected.  The instant answers we get are much closer to gut feelings than to thoughtful analysis.

On balance, we spend much more time thinking about the future than about the past. This makes us uniquely human, and probably much happier.  From science fiction to strategic visioning, we never really leave the past behind, nor are we very good at “prospection”.  Still, the effort is worthwhile because the future lies not in what we learn about our surroundings, but in what we learn about ourselves.