Rather than trying to predict a single future, the concept of alternative futures is to do just what it says: to explore the corners of possibility, and to really envision different alternatives and different outcomes.
As futurists, we face this as people concerned with the future— as people who are “foresight professionals.” In many ways we all have biases in our brains that affect how we understand the world around us, and become certain of particular things.
That process makes it harder for us to see some possibilities or outcomes rather than others. In the last decade or so, we have really learned a lot more about the neuroscience of why that is and how it affects different people. One of the ways of overcoming those limitations is increasing the number of futures that we consider and increasing the number of people who contribute to making those futures.
I wrote an article for Shareable Magazine in which I shared a story about some junior high students my colleague and I worked with at a charter school in East Palo Alto, California. We got an internal grant to do pro-bono work with the school and another non-profit, Collective Roots, to build futures thinking into their curriculum.
We went every week for a trimester, and at the end we had each of the students tell a story about the future they envisioned for themselves. Many of the kids identified with the charter school’s vision for them: they would graduate and go to college and get a job. But there was some variation, including some that really underscores why sharing alternative futures is so important.
One student had an especially strong impact on me. He could not imagine himself in the future. He assumed, with just utter certainty, that he would be dead in 10 years. And this kid was 12. This was clearly very upsetting for me, and I worked really hard to figure out some way of convincing him that he had a future.
I would offer stories and context, and try to talk him through with hypotheticals: “well what if this happened?” And he kept coming back to the future in which he would get shot in a drive-by, or he would get run over by a car, or shot in a robbery if he worked at a store, and he would just come back to that. In the end, he ended up wandering over to a group of his classmates who had built this collective future where they all move to a posh suburb nearby, and had this very nice house together.
He listened and he listened, and then he wrote himself into their future – that he would live with them and take care of their pets and have a good job and not do drugs or go to jail, and he wouldn’t get shot. That’s a perfect example. We couldn’t give him that future.
He had to share a future that his peers created. And the change in his face when he was telling that story, versus when he was telling us that he had no future, that’s the reason why we had as many people as possible to tell their futures.
We all need to imagine and share our stories about the future, so that we can all find futures that we can live in, and that can help us create lives that are meaningful and worth living. Beyond that we need futures that have purpose, that create organizations that have good functions, that help make the world a livable place, and help us to be a viable species.
Alex Zautra and John Hall at the Arizona Resilience Solutions Group at ASU wrote a paper on the idea of resilience in community
psychology. In it they made a note that it didn’t quite make sense to think of risk and resilience as part of the same continuum; minimizing risk and increasing resilience are fundamentally different activities.
So when I say where futures are going in terms of increasing resilience, it’s that change in focus from being concerned only with uncertainties that are risky, uncertainties that could harm people, and uncertainties that could cause financial and ecological loss, to thinking about uncertainties that could help people improve themselves, that could allow systems to become more adaptive to change, to bounce back from catastrophes when they happen. Because no matter how much you minimize risk in complex systems, there are always collapses.
So it’s as much about positioning yourself, about creating a resilient system that bounces back when it has to and improves itself when it can.
My colleague Jamais Cascio wrote an essay in Foreign Policy Magazine a few years ago that looked across disciplines, across design and material science and ecology and community psychology – what are the characteristics of resilient systems, and he identified foresight as one of those characteristics. In Zautra and Hall’s work on adult human resilience, they identify purpose and sustainability over time and foresight as a key to human resilience.
Foresight builds the capacity to be able to respond adaptively to change. But it can’t be passive foresight, as in the used futures or assumed futures. It has to be active, and it has to be flexible. And that is where alternative futures is a discipline for ensuring that flexibility enters into your thinking and maximizes your ability to build the capacity in individuals and organizations, in societies and systems in orde to be resilient in the face of volatility and catastrophe.
I had this one scenario that was tied to a ten year forecast a few years back about the collapse of the food system. I had a very hard time talking about that to people who were really invested in the food system, people who run the food infrastructure of much of the world – they could not imagine their own downfall; and that it was a completely disowned future to them. Now I thought this was kind of a problem and I kept at it anyway, but that’s an example of when things are unthinkable, which sometimes is good and sometimes is very, very dangerous.
Jamais Cascio's blog is called “Open the Future” and his tagline is, “With enough minds, all futures are visible.” The idea is that diversity is important for resilience and diversity in futures is just as important as it is in, you know, biospheres and cultures and all of the things we rely on. There are more futures than there are people in the world, and understanding those and taking those seriously is how we learn to respect each other and to make space for each other in the future that will eventuate and that we will eventually share.
Being able to think about alternatives, being able to explore that broader scope of possibility and plausibility, is really what allows futurists to contribute so powerfully to human resilience. You can prepare yourself for possibilities, which is increasingly important in an increasingly uncertain and volatile world.
Miriam was born in Tacoma, Washington. She was the daughter of an anthropologist and studied cultural anthropology and archaeology at UCencountered the Institute for the Future (IFTF) as a teenager when she was part of a sample study group taken from her school. An internship opened up for her at the Institute after high school. She has worked at IFTF for five years.
As futurists, we face this as people concerned with the future— as people who are “foresight professionals.” In many ways we all have biases in our brains that affect how we understand the world around us, and become certain of particular things.
That process makes it harder for us to see some possibilities or outcomes rather than others. In the last decade or so, we have really learned a lot more about the neuroscience of why that is and how it affects different people. One of the ways of overcoming those limitations is increasing the number of futures that we consider and increasing the number of people who contribute to making those futures.
I wrote an article for Shareable Magazine in which I shared a story about some junior high students my colleague and I worked with at a charter school in East Palo Alto, California. We got an internal grant to do pro-bono work with the school and another non-profit, Collective Roots, to build futures thinking into their curriculum.
We went every week for a trimester, and at the end we had each of the students tell a story about the future they envisioned for themselves. Many of the kids identified with the charter school’s vision for them: they would graduate and go to college and get a job. But there was some variation, including some that really underscores why sharing alternative futures is so important.
One student had an especially strong impact on me. He could not imagine himself in the future. He assumed, with just utter certainty, that he would be dead in 10 years. And this kid was 12. This was clearly very upsetting for me, and I worked really hard to figure out some way of convincing him that he had a future.
I would offer stories and context, and try to talk him through with hypotheticals: “well what if this happened?” And he kept coming back to the future in which he would get shot in a drive-by, or he would get run over by a car, or shot in a robbery if he worked at a store, and he would just come back to that. In the end, he ended up wandering over to a group of his classmates who had built this collective future where they all move to a posh suburb nearby, and had this very nice house together.
He listened and he listened, and then he wrote himself into their future – that he would live with them and take care of their pets and have a good job and not do drugs or go to jail, and he wouldn’t get shot. That’s a perfect example. We couldn’t give him that future.
He had to share a future that his peers created. And the change in his face when he was telling that story, versus when he was telling us that he had no future, that’s the reason why we had as many people as possible to tell their futures.
We all need to imagine and share our stories about the future, so that we can all find futures that we can live in, and that can help us create lives that are meaningful and worth living. Beyond that we need futures that have purpose, that create organizations that have good functions, that help make the world a livable place, and help us to be a viable species.
Alex Zautra and John Hall at the Arizona Resilience Solutions Group at ASU wrote a paper on the idea of resilience in community
psychology. In it they made a note that it didn’t quite make sense to think of risk and resilience as part of the same continuum; minimizing risk and increasing resilience are fundamentally different activities.
So when I say where futures are going in terms of increasing resilience, it’s that change in focus from being concerned only with uncertainties that are risky, uncertainties that could harm people, and uncertainties that could cause financial and ecological loss, to thinking about uncertainties that could help people improve themselves, that could allow systems to become more adaptive to change, to bounce back from catastrophes when they happen. Because no matter how much you minimize risk in complex systems, there are always collapses.
So it’s as much about positioning yourself, about creating a resilient system that bounces back when it has to and improves itself when it can.
My colleague Jamais Cascio wrote an essay in Foreign Policy Magazine a few years ago that looked across disciplines, across design and material science and ecology and community psychology – what are the characteristics of resilient systems, and he identified foresight as one of those characteristics. In Zautra and Hall’s work on adult human resilience, they identify purpose and sustainability over time and foresight as a key to human resilience.
Foresight builds the capacity to be able to respond adaptively to change. But it can’t be passive foresight, as in the used futures or assumed futures. It has to be active, and it has to be flexible. And that is where alternative futures is a discipline for ensuring that flexibility enters into your thinking and maximizes your ability to build the capacity in individuals and organizations, in societies and systems in orde to be resilient in the face of volatility and catastrophe.
I had this one scenario that was tied to a ten year forecast a few years back about the collapse of the food system. I had a very hard time talking about that to people who were really invested in the food system, people who run the food infrastructure of much of the world – they could not imagine their own downfall; and that it was a completely disowned future to them. Now I thought this was kind of a problem and I kept at it anyway, but that’s an example of when things are unthinkable, which sometimes is good and sometimes is very, very dangerous.
Jamais Cascio's blog is called “Open the Future” and his tagline is, “With enough minds, all futures are visible.” The idea is that diversity is important for resilience and diversity in futures is just as important as it is in, you know, biospheres and cultures and all of the things we rely on. There are more futures than there are people in the world, and understanding those and taking those seriously is how we learn to respect each other and to make space for each other in the future that will eventuate and that we will eventually share.
Being able to think about alternatives, being able to explore that broader scope of possibility and plausibility, is really what allows futurists to contribute so powerfully to human resilience. You can prepare yourself for possibilities, which is increasingly important in an increasingly uncertain and volatile world.
***
Miriam was born in Tacoma, Washington. She was the daughter of an anthropologist and studied cultural anthropology and archaeology at UCencountered the Institute for the Future (IFTF) as a teenager when she was part of a sample study group taken from her school. An internship opened up for her at the Institute after high school. She has worked at IFTF for five years.