Futurists rarely talk about the impossible. Indeed, we spend much of our professional lives telling people nothing is impossible. When pushed, we’ll talk about probabilities and improbabilities, but we just can’t commit to impossible.

With one exception: it is impossible to know the future.

Instead, like quantum physicists, we imagine a cloud of potential futures. Certainly some are more likely than others. It is much easier to imagine a future a hundred years out with jet packs than a return to steam power. Could our world – due to silicon eating nanobots, religious fervor, sentient machines, or whatever – revert to early industrial ways? Sure. Is it likely? Not really. However, that particular future is not impossible. Flipping that assertion around, however, doesn’t work. We’re unable to say that the future will not be one of steam-belching carriages.

Because the future is unknowable until the moment it becomes the present (again, similarly to quantum observation) it makes sense to develop approaches and strategies to maximize the emergence of a number of desirable futures. Companies accomplish this through strategic planning, governments through policy work, households and individuals through hundreds of conversations and decisions. It is something that makes us uniquely human.

So…why are we so bad at it?

I’d argue that despite knowing better, we (whether a government, a company, a family, or just you or me) create a vision of a future, plan our way to that future, and then go about following the plan. The difficulty comes when things change. Our frame of the future – like cognitive frames more generally – often doesn’t permit the possibility of a new vision of the future. We continue on while the probability of our envisioned future gets more and more difficult to bring about.

In the world of policy, where vast amounts of political and financial capital are often invested in singular visions of the future, the disconnect has profound repercussions. Elsewhere, many companies have responded to repeated (and expensive) disconnects by keeping future visions to a few years out, and then building organizations that can maneuver successfully within that context. Families and individuals are more flexible simply by virtue of the level of resources committed to the future vision.

In all cases, much is being left on the table.

Futurists often claim that their most important role is to change minds. That’s true, but our larger task is to help our clients recognize the boundaries they’ve imposed in crafting their future visions, assist them in exploring an entire cloud of available futures, and make decisions that help them prepare for a range of beneficial futures.

Our colleague John Mahaffie has written some on the role of frames and reframing in futures work, and I recommend it. We’ll feature some of our own thoughts on reframing later.