I Think I Can Feel the Future

Design Science Studio

Imaginable

Vividly imagining a possible future creates memories of things we haven’t actually lived through yet. So the pandemic felt familiar to him. And research suggests that future memories have a real psychological benefit, if and when a traumatic future we imagined actually happens. It’s not just that we are less surprised by what happens. We also get a significant boost of self-confidence from having been right about the future. And this confidence makes us more likely to take action and help others. Here’s why. The fact that we saw the future coming before it happened creates a specific response in the brain. The very first emotion we feel isn’t shock but recognition. We recognize this strange new world because we have spent time there in our imagination before. Recognition communicates to us, “You know this. You’ve got this!” It is a powerful antidote to feelings of helplessness and fear. Our foreknowledge of what happened causes us to feel less overwhelmed, more in control, and better able to help.

Jane McGonigal, Imaginable: How to see the future coming and feel ready for anything—even things that seem impossible today

The Bible

Bauhaus

So let us therefore create a new guild of craftsmen, free of the divisive class pretensions that endeavoured to raise a prideful barrier between craftsmen and artists! Let us strive for, conceive and create the new building of the future that will unite every discipline, architecture and sculpture and painting, and which will one day rise heavenwards from the million hands of craftsmen as a clear symbol of a new belief to come.’

Foundation

“The character, Gaal, in the Foundation TV series is realizing the ability to perceive the future before it happens, anticipating problems before they actually happen. This, in fact, is the entire premise of the series. Both science and religion are predicting a new political paradigm precipitated by the inevitable fall of the Galactic Empire. The Foundation is devised as a means of breaking the fall of the empire by preserving the knowledge and skills to rebuild human civilization in the form of an Encyclopedia Galactica.”

Light & Magic

“This meant that there was literally no limit to what you could do in the middle. When I saw that, I felt like I had seen the future.… This is going to change the world!”

“There was no limit on your imagination and it just had to be pursued.”

“Dennis, he saw the future there, way before anybody else was thinking about that here in the company.”

Prophecy

Human Experience

How can I explain this to business analysts and CEOs in simpler terms? Because I’ve come to a point now where they’re trying to understand the thinking behind UX and they don’t understand that moving one element to make one screen changes the way the user has to engage with a screen along with how it affects the rest of the journey flows and they don’t care about inclusivity or the next billion users. They just think I’m complicating things when it’s them that’s over complicating everything.

As mammals split off from the reptilian line, a fresh neural structure blossomed within their skulls. This brand-new brain transformed not just the mechanics of reproduction but also the organismic orientation toward offspring. Detachment and disinterest mark the parental attitude of the typical reptile, while mammals can enter into subtle and elaborate interactions with their young.

Mammals bear their young live; they nurse, defend, and rear them while they are immature. Mammals, in other words, *take care of their own*. Rearing and caretaking are so familiar to humans that we are apt to take them for granted, but these capacities were once novel—a revolution in social evolution. The most common reaction a reptile has to its young is indifference; it lays its eggs and walks (or slithers) away. Mammals form close-knit, mutually nurturant social groups—families—in which members spend time touching and caring for one another. Parents nourish and safeguard their young, and each other, from the hostile world outside their group. A mammal will risk and sometimes lose its life to protect a child or mate from attack. A garter snake or a salamander watches the death of its kin with an unblinking eye.

"To invest successfully does not require a stratospheric IQ, unusual business insights, or inside information. What's needed is a sound intellectual framework for making decisions and the ability to keep emotions from corroding the framework."

The function of the CEO and the business analyst are the survival of the corporate business model. One must translate emotion and empathy into business metrics. In the same way, the reptilian brain maintains the security and survival systems. Executive function is performed by the least empathetic organ. This is system one thinking in Daniel Kahneman’s concepts in Thinking, Fast and Slow. Humanity is found in the neocortex, where the distinctly mammalian characteristics of emotional intelligence, play, imagination, and creativity are manifest. The challenge for the designer, when communicating with decision-makers, is one of translation from System Two to System One thinking.

Imaginable

I’m proud of how accurate our forecasts turned out to be. But now, looking back at how slow society was to react to the growing threat and how stuck so many of our leaders were in old ways of thinking and doing, I no longer believe that the most important work of a large-scale social simulation like Superstructure is to accurately predict what people will do. Instead, the most important work of a future simulation is to prepare our minds and stretch our collective imagination, so we are more flexible, adaptable, agile, and resilient when the “unthinkable” happens.

Episodic Future Thinking

You might be wondering at this point how we know so much about episodic future thinking and the brain. In the past twenty years, there have been over five thousand pee-reviewed scientific studies published on the topic. Why do scientists study it? For four reasons, mainly.

First, EFT is strongly linked with mental well-being. People who engage in EFT are more likely to feel optimistic, motivated, and in control of their future. They are less likely to feel anxious or depressed. Researchers believe this is because *when you practice EFT, you learn to control your imagination*.

Scientists who study EFT have found that people who suffer from depression tend to imagine their future with only the vaguest of details. For them, a positive future is hard to imagine because their brain leaves too many of the mental blanks infilled. For this reason, they can’t vividly anticipate pleasure. They don’t feel motivated by possible positive events. And they can’t convincingly envision their future as being different from today. Their imagination gets stuck and leaves them, almost literally, with nothing to look forward to.

Scientists also study EFT because a decline in EFT skills can be caused by a variety of health challenges that impact cognitive health, including aging-related dementia, post-traumatic stress disorder, concussion, and brain fog induced by chronic pain or chronic illness.

A third reason many researches are interested in EFT is that it seems to be a highly effective tool for behavior change. Research shows that people who learn how to more vividly and plausibly imagine their own personal futures are more likely to make healthy eating choices, keep up new exercise or meditation habits, save money for long-term goals, complete their education, vote in elections, buy more sustainable and environmentally friendly products, break the cycle of addiction, and stick with any kind of long-term resolution to change. What all these behaviours have in common is that they require us to make an effort or choice today that will have a delayed benefit.

The fourth and final reason we know so much about what happens in the brain during EFT is that it’s linked with creativity, something many people want to get better at.

Often, when I teach or speak about EFT and its connections to mental health, cognitive ability, behavioral change, and creativity, a parent or educator will ask me, “Should we be teaching to in schools?” Or “Is this something I should be practicing with my kids? How young can you start doing this kind of training?” The simple answer is yes, I believe we should teach EEFT in schools, and students can start quite young. The research shows that children typically develop all of the basic cognitive abilities necessary for EFT by the time they are just four or five years old.

Here’s my advice: use this time now to identify one thing you could do to help one person affected by this force, now or in the future.

Signal of Change

A signal of change is a concrete example of how the world could one day be different.

When you find a signal of change that really sparks your passion, roll up your sleeves and get involved. As the philosopher Alan Watts wrote, “The only way to make sense of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.” You’re less likely to be shocked by the future, or it feel left out of it, if you jump in to be a part of the changes that are already underway. You may decide you want to slow down those changes or reverse them; or you may want to help accelerate them. Or you may just enjoy the confidence-building feeling of having seen it coming, of having recognized and participated in the future while it was still being made.

Grand Challenges

It’s an idea I first encountered during a One Hundred Ways Anything Can Be Different in the Future game that I led at the Institute for the Future’s annual Ten-Year Forecast conference, on “the future of learning.” One of the game’s participants flipped the fact “Today, college students have to pick a major, like biology, business administration, English literature, or political science” to “Ten years from now, college students have to pick a grand challenge, like climate action, ending poverty, gender equality, or zero hunger.” She explained the concept to our group: Students interested in all kinds of subject areas and careers—engineering, communications, teaching, political service, entrepreneurship, medicine, the arts—would come together and spend two to three years developing knowledge and skills around specific urgent global challenges. Instead of siloed majors, college learning would be more interdisciplinary and purpose driven. And careers, instead of being about choosing an industry or profession, would be more about deciding what problem you want to help humanity solve—as an engineer, mental health counsellor, filmmaker, journalist, investment banker, nutritionist, marketing creative, social worker, or whatever else you might do with your days. Every type of major or career would be reimagined in service of something much, much bigger. Every course would look at a different angle of the problem—historical, economic, scientific, political, cultural—or explore possible solution spaces or interventions—technological, social, financial, behavioral. No one would worry that their major was “irrelevant” or that they would wind up in a “bullshit” job. It’s all hands on deck for things that really matter.

Specialists and Generalists

Learned Helpfulness

Playing with a future scenario, it turns out, can be a uniquely therapeutic practice. It can give us a chance to practice the opposite of learned helplessness: learned helpfulness.

Learned helpfulness simply means building our own confidence and sense of control when it comes to solving problems for ourselves and others.

Dream the Future Together

To dream the future together, we need to document and share what we imagine. This is the most crucial part of social simulations: we must record all the strange things we’ve conjured up in our minds, giving narrative form to the surreal thoughts and imagery.

The more people who participate in a social simulation, the more the collective imagination grows.

Feel That Future

The year 2026

More than a billion people have joined a new social network called FeelThat.

It’s like any other social network—but instead of sharing words, photos, or videos, you share your physical sensations and emotions.

Light & Magic

Morfing

Catalyzing Change

The rich elite gains their power and influence from things remaining as they are, and they will do all they can to make sure the status quo is maintained. Their wealth and power mean more to them than the existential threat the climate crisis poses to humanity. And so it’s unrealistic to imagine they would voluntarily allow the implementation of a radical set of policies that will help transform society and allow us to create an economy that works within environmental limits.

The only way to catalyse change is from the bottom up. As we progress into the twenty-first century, what’s certain is the impacts of the climate crisis are going to become far more aggressive. As it gets warmer and drier, droughts will become more severe, leading to wide-scale crop failures. With crop failures come food shortages and increasing prices. It’s then that the system as it is will begin to be questioned by the masses because when people are hungry, they riot. When people are hungry, law and order will break down and calls for radical change will increase. Before that happens, things are going to have to get a whole lot worse for people to wake up to the reality we’re facing.