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Planning your Future¹
No-one can predict the future, yet we all make plans based on our assumptions and desires. Making plans in a changing and complex environment is a little like being the captain of a ship faced with uncertain weather and variable seas. Yet, he still puts to sea in pursuit of his desires. But, despite the daunting prospects and just like the captain, if we know where we want to go we can chart a course, navigate with our compass, use our lookout's weather eyes, and trim our sails to make the best of the changing conditions.
Source¹: Shaping Tomorrow
Making better plans
Society today is all at sea tossed around like little boats in a swirling maelstrom of change. But the smarter captains anticipate the future and create very different expeditions to new places from those we all experienced yesterday. These captains signal their change of direction and it is up to us to interpret and use their signals or chart our own very different course.
We all do this unconsciously when we watch the news, read the paper, or talk to friends and, in turn, seek to influence our communities, families, and organizations. If you’ve ever planned for a holiday, job interview, trip to the movies, shopping for dinner, thought about what to wear for the following day, or looked at your watch to check what time it is, then you have been shaping your own tomorrow using foresight to plan ahead. Foresight work is therefore an everyday issue of life that pretty well every person on the planet engages in at some level or another. But, most people have learned these skills from others and have had no formal training in how to interpret and respond to the myriad of signals they receive each day. A school's curricula rarely expose us to thinking about and acting in the future except at a very shallow level and awareness of futures education opportunities is very low.
Inquisitive people who engage with and try to improve their foresight seek to add greater breadth, depth, and distance to the process of formulating decisions because all choices have future consequences. Yet often we rely too heavily (or solely) on history as our guide. Even the dominant western paradigm of financial markets recognizes that "past performance is no guarantee to future success" – a warning to consumers that is now a part of any financial growth instrument.
Examining consequences
While an often significant factor for consideration, "history" is an unreliable guide to the future. Most members of the public would have heard of, or been exposed to, some of the more common "foresight tools" like forecasting, trends, and scenarios.
These approaches are but three of more than forty methods that professionals use when thinking about the future and when considering in greater detail a future-based issue. Foresight oriented people consciously choose to give themselves the time to consider in greater detail the future-based consequences of their actions before deciding the path to take. To that extent both forecasting and trend projections are highly limited in scope, with both methods being attempts to extend history (current thinking and paradigms) by "predicting" the future. Scenarios also have their place, and they do so only when given specific contexts in which they can be considered. Instead, exploring the space between the "possible" and "probable" ensures that any assessment of the much needed "Breadth," "Depth," and "Distance" components yields a more critical consideration of future potential.
Source: Adapted from the work of Marcus Barber (Australia 2020) with his kind permission.
Further References
Next: Finding Time for the Future Back: Personal Futures To: Shaping Tomorrow
Copyright: Some rights reserved. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
No-one can predict the future, yet we all make plans based on our assumptions and desires. Making plans in a changing and complex environment is a little like being the captain of a ship faced with uncertain weather and variable seas. Yet, he still puts to sea in pursuit of his desires. But, despite the daunting prospects and just like the captain, if we know where we want to go we can chart a course, navigate with our compass, use our lookout's weather eyes, and trim our sails to make the best of the changing conditions.
Source¹: Shaping Tomorrow
Making better plans
Society today is all at sea tossed around like little boats in a swirling maelstrom of change. But the smarter captains anticipate the future and create very different expeditions to new places from those we all experienced yesterday. These captains signal their change of direction and it is up to us to interpret and use their signals or chart our own very different course.
We all do this unconsciously when we watch the news, read the paper, or talk to friends and, in turn, seek to influence our communities, families, and organizations. If you’ve ever planned for a holiday, job interview, trip to the movies, shopping for dinner, thought about what to wear for the following day, or looked at your watch to check what time it is, then you have been shaping your own tomorrow using foresight to plan ahead. Foresight work is therefore an everyday issue of life that pretty well every person on the planet engages in at some level or another. But, most people have learned these skills from others and have had no formal training in how to interpret and respond to the myriad of signals they receive each day. A school's curricula rarely expose us to thinking about and acting in the future except at a very shallow level and awareness of futures education opportunities is very low.
Inquisitive people who engage with and try to improve their foresight seek to add greater breadth, depth, and distance to the process of formulating decisions because all choices have future consequences. Yet often we rely too heavily (or solely) on history as our guide. Even the dominant western paradigm of financial markets recognizes that "past performance is no guarantee to future success" – a warning to consumers that is now a part of any financial growth instrument.
Examining consequences
While an often significant factor for consideration, "history" is an unreliable guide to the future. Most members of the public would have heard of, or been exposed to, some of the more common "foresight tools" like forecasting, trends, and scenarios.
These approaches are but three of more than forty methods that professionals use when thinking about the future and when considering in greater detail a future-based issue. Foresight oriented people consciously choose to give themselves the time to consider in greater detail the future-based consequences of their actions before deciding the path to take. To that extent both forecasting and trend projections are highly limited in scope, with both methods being attempts to extend history (current thinking and paradigms) by "predicting" the future. Scenarios also have their place, and they do so only when given specific contexts in which they can be considered. Instead, exploring the space between the "possible" and "probable" ensures that any assessment of the much needed "Breadth," "Depth," and "Distance" components yields a more critical consideration of future potential.
Source: Adapted from the work of Marcus Barber (Australia 2020) with his kind permission.
Further References
Next: Finding Time for the Future Back: Personal Futures To: Shaping Tomorrow
Copyright: Some rights reserved. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
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