“As Alvin Toffler tells us, there are all kinds of time spanners that connect us to the past, but we don’t have a heritage of the future. We don’t have memory to help us adapt to the things we see in the future,” said Stuart Candy, Director of the Situation Lab, Foresight & Design professor at OCAD University, Canada, and a Fellow of The Long Now Foundation.
Speaking at Amplify Festival 2015, he explained we have a hard time imagining what the future looks like when we try to think of it as a broad field. We need scaffolding to help us structure our minds. To help us do that, he made it as simple as a card game.
In this brainstorming game called The Thing From the Future, consider a scenario involving a topic (‘genetics’), a state (‘a transformed world’), a time period (‘25 years ahead’), and a mood (‘weirdness’). Members of the group pair up and think of a newspaper headline of this scenario. Two examples given: “Gay couple gives birth to a clone of their grandfather” and “A man with four arms decides he needs two more.”
Stuart Candy at Amplify Festival 2015 (image: Rawn Shah)
Such an experiential learning approach gives someone a glimpse into a futurist’s practice: the development of scenarios. It is a simple game that gives us a way to consider and generate many scenarios. [The actual card deck for this game is available directly from Situation Lab’s site.]
Per Prof Candy, there are two reasons why thinking about the future is difficult. First, our brains, even though very plastic and adaptable, that ability to adapt is not the same the ability to anticipate. Second, the future does not exist, but we tend to think of it in terms of our past.
“The fact that we lived through one path is not the only path we can live through. Every chess game begins the same way. If you start the game off, you have 20 possibilities of how both players can move their first piece --all the pawns and the two knights. In the next move, the space of possibility moves to 400. After you have moved twice, the possibilities jump to over 72,000. After three times, it is over 9 million. After four times, it is 3x more than all the billions of galaxies in the universe. And this is just chess.”
There is no way, we can enumerate and predict what the future is going to be. What we can do is to think of the kinds of futures we can find ourselves in, and prepare our minds to explore these exemplary kinds of worlds.”
He explained to me later that Future or Foresight research is concerned with three kinds of scenarios: the Possible, the Probable, and the Preferable – what could happen; what we think is likely; and what we prefer.
A next step might be to take the generated scenarios from the earlier exercise and as a group frame them into these categories. Certainly, we each bring our own views, biases, and preferences when we imagine and discuss. The challenge is to overcome groupthink or consolidation simply to get agreement. This is where it helps to have a future design mindset to conceive multiple possibilities.
It is rare to find professionals trained in this area, and even rarer to find places that teach such a field of informatics or design. OCAD University in Toronto, Canada, where Prof. Candy teaches, offers a Master of Design in Strategic Foresight and Innovation. The California College of the Arts in San Francisco,
These programs offer those seeking careers in Design, Innovation or Business Strategy particular skills and techniques in analysis, synthesis and strategic and creative thinking that become ever more important in our volatile and connected world.
Rawn Shah is Director of Rising edge, an independent consultancy focused on work culture, collaboration, and the evolution of management. You can follow him on Twitter, or LinkedIn.
