How to imagine the future without pretending we can predict it
For those who can feel the dull pain of another strat planning season
I signed up for the Asian Institute of Management’s Futures Thinking Fundamentals back in 2023 to stay sane and keep my mind occupied. Not my finest year. I was having anxiety for breakfast and self-doubt for snacks, and in hindsight, enrolling in a course that played with grand visions and catastrophic scenarios just felt so on freaking brand.
Fully processing the learnings took longer than it should, but alas, we are here in another strat season. To help you make things mildly/pleasantly chaotic, spicy, and fresh, allow me to introduce an anti-planning paradigm.
It is especially useful for creative organizations trying to see beyond the next quarter and take the longer view on policy, business, and tbh, life.
Determinism vs Emergence
Here’s the gist. In futures thinking, there are two big camps for how we deal with tomorrow:
The deterministic, “with enough data, we can predict anything” camp. The future is kind of set. Think trendlines, forecasts, and optimization. It’s tidy, logical, and great for when tomorrow looks a lot like yesterday or today.
Anticipation for emergence camp. This one says the future is messy, unknowable, and sometimes absurd. Instead of forcing predictions, it asks us to imagine different tomorrows and to diversify the kinds of futures we prepare for.
Neither is “better.”
And there is wisdom in knowing when to forecast and when to imagine futures.
How to imagine
Foresight workshops force you to imagine. If we try to summarize how it’s done, we see three big components:
Reveal. Start by surfacing the hopes and fears we usually push into the background. A common exercise is to imagine a faraway future, say, 2050, and describe what we see. Often, participants end up sketching shinier, more advanced versions of what already exists.
Reframe. From there, we push further. The goal is to introduce scenarios that feel unusual, sometimes unsettling, to stretch our sense of what’s possible, for better or worse. Think of a total collapse of ocean ecosystems, a world where pets are granted voting rights, or a time when life expectancy has doubled and people no longer die from diseases.
Rethink. This stage is about making sense of the strange futures explored. Instead of treating them as wild thought experiments, we connect the dots: what signals in the present could actually point us toward these possibilities?
What trade-offs, risks, or opportunities might they reveal? By mapping the web of dependencies, technological, social, environmental, and political, we begin to see not just what could happen, but what it would take to get there, and how today’s choices ripple into tomorrow. This is where imagination meets strategy.
Which means that we can actively pursue the most ideal futures. Take note, FUTURES with an ‘s.’
In an anti-planning paradigm, success isn’t about getting the forecast right. It’s about staying limber and cultivating the ability to pivot when the unlikely, or the downright bizarre, actually happens. There are many futures, and in them, many surprises.
The course I took in 2023 tackled many tools, some I remember, most I do not.
But when the program ended, I was merely thankful that the future is not set, and that, most of all, I have today.