Peering into the future

🧠 I’ve certainly been stuck in the land of depressing gloomy thoughts lately. The world is a challenging place right now and it requires mental discipline and a lot of self care to survive and thrive.

🔮 The four futures framework is a good tool for planning for what may be next. Created by James Dator in his work on futures studies, it states that all the stories we talk about the future fall into one of four categories: continued growth, collapse, discipline, and transformation.

🌎 Back in 2010, Sara Robinson used the four futures model to look at climate change that illustrates how focusing on just one of these categories is a recipie for problems: “A huge government system that’s set up explicitly to perpetuate the Continuation future can’t help but greet the other three futures with varying degrees of incomprehension and resistance.”

📈 The four futures framework dovetails nicely with the S-curve of growth and you can see the various futures playing themselves out everywhere. Digitally driven transformations are all around, and have accellerated during this pandemic year of disruption. At the same time, all sorts of long-standing instutions are in various states of collapse.

🧘‍♀️ No matter what framework you use to deal with the future, meditation helps.

🤗 One specific bit of good news: We’ve long thought that the best way to influence each other is to be in the same physical space. Shane Snow, however, writes in Forbes that influence has more to do with generosity than being physically close. Certainly something to look at and pratice.

👩🏿 #BLM