The Future of Futures
We’re giving futures a facelift by making it accessible, to inspire a practice of imagination and curiosity we can all adopt to be less fearful, and to take more ownership of the decisions we make in our lives and businesses. The idea of the future has always been polarising. For some, exciting prospects of innovation, technology, and advancing how (and where) we live; for others the fear of the unknown; a world gone rogue, too much technology, controlled by robots and an uninhabitable environment.
In recent years our fear of the future has intensified. Misinformation, social media and algorithmic control, catastrophic global leadership, racial tension, a climate in seemingly irreversible crisis, and a global pandemic causing over 5 million deaths to date have certainly done their best to make even the most optimistic among us question whether the future is anything we really want to see.
I was one of them. For as long as I can remember, uncertainty has made me distinctly uncomfortable. Like that stone in your running shoe kind of uncomfortable. Not to be mistaken for being risk averse, or for being a control freak (of which I am neither), but rather a mental state you reach when you feel like there isn’t enough information at your disposal to enable you to make a decision you’re going to trust yourself to make, and deal with.
So you can imagine my elation at the arrival of Covid-19. Yup, that was a tough time. In the space of a short few weeks it uprooted my business, my plan, my income and my “certainty". But after prompting me to proactively close the business I’d moved country to join and run, reconfiguring my career and how I work, something amazing started to happen. I started to get strangely comfortable, with being uncomfortable.
This got me wondering why. A lot. It also got me thinking about the future in a different way.
You see the future is not something that we can predict, plan or define. But it is something that we can make for ourselves by taking more ownership of the decisions we make, the actions we take and the value we create. To do this we need to adopt a futures mindset. That is, by being more curious, enquiring and aware of the world around us (not just what exists in our ‘lanes’) we can exercise our imaginations to build plausible versions of what the future could be. We can then assess how we feel about those scenarios, and create actions that can enable us to realise them, or more simply, adapt to them.
“The way I saw it, the world had just experienced a brush with mortality.”
When we think this way we become more creative, optimistic, empathetic and hopeful. We’re more innovative. We feel better. We become better people, friends, colleagues and leaders.
I also discovered three other interesting facts:
As we get older, we lose the propensity to think in a futures mindset. Trust me, it’s a neuro thing.
The only thing that forces a future mindset onto all humans (irrespective of age), is a brush with mortality. Again, also a neuro thing.
Over a 10 year period and a survey of over 2,500 businesses around the world, the Institute For The Future concluded that organisations that invest in futures thinking grow 200% faster and are 33% more profitable than those that don’t.
The way I saw it, the world had just experienced a brush with mortality, which was channeling this view in me. And I liked it. So I started getting into futures. As an amateur cultural anthropologist, strategic leader and frustrated creative with a helluva imagination it was like drinking from the holy grail.
But I also discovered an issue.
The problem with a lot of futurist literature and presentation, in my opinion, is that they suffer from the bad habit of over intellectualising the topic. The futures they talk about and write about become opportunities to flex intellect, inflate ego’s and confuse people, when really what we should be doing is liberating them. The result is more fear, less engagement, more apathy, less hope, and less action.
So I started thinking about what futures should be, and how I could make it so. Futures should be accessible to more people, be more relatable, more provocative, more action orientated and less overwhelming.
But most importantly it should ultimately encourage us all to think more imaginatively and enable us to take more ownership of paths we take. It should open our minds beyond our comfort zones, to better formulate ideas and feelings about the futures we want to create, and not be a victim of.
We should all ask ‘What If’ more. We should all ask ‘Why’ more. Because in a world that is evolving and becoming more automated by the second, the one thing that defines us as humans against our robotic counterparts is our imagination.
So what started as a personal journey became a business idea, and fortunately the culmination of my skillset and attitude. A desire to help people, and businesses look forward with more foresight, imagination and optimism, together with a healthy dose of practical skepticism (those Scottish roots run deep) and rational strategy to create personal and commercial growth.
This is Sunny. It’s the embodiment of me, and we are here to help you feel more imaginative, more creative, more innovative and inspired about the future you’re going to grow into.
After all, the best way to predict the future is to invent it.
