Thursday, June 11, 2020

The future doesn't just happen. It is up to you

There is only one scenario in which the future happens to you - the one in which you take no action.

The future is, quite literally, what you make it. It isn't some weird place, separate from us and our decisions. It is entirely the result of our collective response - our actions taken - to the present and our anticipation of our own needs and those of others in the context of now and next.

By its nature the future contains anything that is possible. If it's possible, it can happen.

Some of those possibilities are beyond our control (The emergence of a pandemic is a good example - and even in these it is our response that allows us to control our experience of them).

However - most possible outcomes are the result of our responses. We are imagining and deciding the future we intend to live in.

I am not dismissing the structural frameworks that limit the choices of many people now. I am saying the collective choices we make now are deciding how those frameworks get to impact the lives of people in the future.

In the future, our needs will be the same. The context in which we experience them will vary.

It is in our understanding of those needs in the emerging contexts of the future that we are able to shape the future we intend.

We can allocate our resources to probe for them, make sense of them and serve them.

This is the promise of the Responsive Organisation: It is not simply to test and learn all possible futures - it is to provide the mindset and ways of working to create the future you can imagine and intend. That is, one:
  • Informed by insight,
  • Ignited by imagination
  • Centred on the human experience
  • Constrained by the resources and goals of the organisation.
If it's a future you intend to have a future, it should also be constrained by making a positive response to the needs of people and planet.

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The rate of change is so rapid it's difficult for one person to keep up to speed. Let's pool our thoughts, share our reactions and, who knows, even reach some shared conclusions worth arriving at?