Despite the uncertainty and unknowability of the future, there is a growing recognition that how we think and imagine the future, and our expectations about what will happen in the future, guide and direct our actions today. Masu.
Personally, I might stock up on canned food if I think there will be food shortages due to the pandemic. As a community leader, I might organize a canned food drive based on the same expectations. Even if this imagined future never materializes, it still guides my decisions and actions as an individual today. These collectively held expectations and images of the future guide and direct the allocation of investments, attention, activities, and resources in the wider world.
However, given their importance, limited attention has been paid to where and how these collectively held images of the future emerge and, importantly, who fosters them. I’m here. Are we really going to leave it to celebrity billionaires like Elon Musk to decide what the future holds? We need to take future-making practices more seriously and explore how they can be mobilized to generate social innovation and necessary systemic change.
Definition of “creating the future”
We evoke the future in a variety of ways, including the future of work, future security, future generations, moving toward the future, and saving the future. But anthropologist and futurist (and fellow Australian) Genevieve Bell points out that even in this evocation, we often neglect to consider important questions such as: doing. “Who can talk about the future?” Who can predict its course? And who can defend certain future developments?1 In other words, who will carry out the practical work of creating the future and how? Answering these questions is important given how powerful imagined futures are in driving economic activity and social impact.
In organization and management theory, future creation is defined as “the work of understanding, evaluating, and negotiating possible and likely futures, and shaping a preferred one.”2 Creating the Future evaluates and guides diverse organizational relationships and processes, including strategy and entrepreneurship.3 As such, it is fundamental for understanding the temporal dynamics of different types of organizations, in addition to economic activities, and continues to be a growing field of academic research.
There are several conceptual approaches to creating the future. One approach is to think of this as a pragmatist inquiry, where we engage with representations of the future (visual or verbal) that allow us to consider the future, especially in the present.Four The future exists and is expressed orally in the form of stories, or visually in the form of text, pictures, graphs, and other notations. Consider the hockey stick growth graph often seen in startup pitch materials. Or the current story of how AI is disrupting financial markets and transforming impact measurement. That is, the future in a particular way, for particular people and for particular organizations. Through representation, participants engage with such futures, make judgments, directly and indirectly develop their desired futures, and aim to take actions towards them.
Another approach to creating the future is to engage in “possibility thinking.”Five It is a cognitive practice that involves systematically deconstructing and questioning the assumptions underlying existing solutions in order to develop new worlds. It requires both extending attention to longer time periods and interdependent systems, as well as fine-grained attention to local anomalies.
Why building the future is important
Sociologist Jens Beckert brilliantly explains the important role of “imaginary expectations” in market dynamics. These expectations are based on specific imagined futures that either drive the economy’s activity or push it into crisis if they fail to materialize.6 Future-making is therefore important because, according to Beckert, imagined futures motivate and organize economic activity “despite the incalculable consequences.”7
Social innovators need to consider how they cultivate and shape imagined futures and what challenges this poses for motivating and attracting resources and commitment to specific social change efforts. there is. For example, we may often work retrospectively, trying to solve past problems in the present, without considering creating the future.
This means that new solutions and solutions that still exist within the same social structures and systems, are implicitly embedded in particular ideas about the future, and are dependent (or rather stuck) on the same economic growth narratives. It can lead to the creation of innovative ideas. This makes it extremely difficult to think beyond existing systems, make the cognitive and paradigmatic leaps necessary to address big challenges, or achieve system change.
rethink the future
There are several things that individuals and organizations can do to improve the way social innovation and future-making for social impact are deployed.
Social innovators need to consider how they cultivate and shape imagined futures and what challenges this poses for motivating and attracting resources and commitment to specific social change efforts. there is.
Create alternative imaginary futures. Recent research suggests that a way to begin the process of future-making is to investigate sites of hyperprojectivity such as community and policy forums, public debates, sources of hype (such as new ideas and technologies), and science fiction. suggests.8 Opening up the possibility of alternative futures means that out-of-the-box ideas are not simply dismissed, but rather what is happening on the periphery of a field or industry, or in the space between fields, or locally. This means that attention is paid to unusual situations. Looking for examples of positive deviations and actual utopias provides evidence that alternatives can work.
Consider how your organization can actually access these sites. Where do you source your research? And does it provide breadth or only depth? How do you engage with and access organizations working on new ideas and technologies? What is the role of feedback loops in thinking about what was going on? Can counterfactuals be used in the strategy development process? How do you visualize the systems you are operating? , are you aware of interdependencies, external limits, breaking points? And importantly, who is creating the future, not you?
Justify your imagined future. We need to recognize that some imagined futures are accepted as more trustworthy than others, so we need to understand which stakeholders, at the organizational or policy level, are responsible for shaping the future. It is important to consider who is involved in the process and how it helps build legitimacy. Both internal and external stakeholders and the ability of digital platforms to expand stakeholder engagement must be considered. Also consider the role of social proof when physical evidence is not available and how it helps build legitimacy. Does the proximity or support of particular stakeholders create legitimacy? Stakeholder diversity also plays a role, especially in sustaining the emotional energy often needed to foster belief in imagined futures. , is an important consideration.
Take action toward an imagined alternative future. It is important for organizations and policy makers to reflect on their imagined future and identify the preferred path to reach this imagined future. This makes it possible to examine the present and uncover what is preventing that future from becoming a reality.9 What then will it take to scale these alternative futures?
If we take future-making more seriously as an organizational and policy practice, rather than leaving it up to individual celebrities to decide what the future will look like, it provides powerful tools with the potential to generate new ideas and shapes. They will do it for you. This is the innovation we desperately need to transform existing systems and fundamentally rethink the way we organize and govern to impact society.
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