At the most basic level, of course, we’re evolutionary creatures and so experience change as part of a biological process. We’re also, of course, sentient, self-reflective beings and so experience change as an intellectual and emotional force, as part of what makes humanity human. Even so, even with our relatively enormous brains, and our sophisticated cultural and social apparatus, we deal considerably better with gradual change, where we can adapt and integrate it into our lives. While our cultural change receptors are tuned very high but create enormous distortion, our biological and social change receptors are tuned way down, and so simply miss much of the input.

This presents an obvious problem, and that problem is our real inability to grapple with, and make sense of, dramatic change – despite living in a culture that worships it. In turn, this inability, perhaps even frustration, manifests itself in futures that are tinged, perhaps even polluted, with sameness.

Of course, much about the future will be the same, or at least a similitude of the same. After all, many forces that shape our lives and experiences are profound, even universal. Love, happiness, compassion, security, and comfort among others all shape the past, the present, and the future. Some sameness is to be expected (and perhaps even hoped for). But with much else, even some big, slow things like demography or climate, the future may look dramatically and incomprehensively different.

My title pulls together two strands of current futures thinking that illustrate this problem. “Welcome to the future” is from a Brad Paisley song titled “Everyday’s a revolution”. “It’s banal,” is from a brief piece by Bruce Sterling that he did for Webstock this year. These two guys are very different, yet they offer surprisingly similar messages, and both are good portholes through which we can look at this difficulty.

Paisley’s poignant (and nostalgic) ballad offers up pieces of the past – the ferocity of the Second World War, cross-burnings in the barely integrated south, lumbering video game machines packed into arcades – and compares them to the now-future:

And I’d have given anything
to have my own PacMan game at home.
I used to have to get a ride down to the arcade;
Now I’ve got it on my phone.

My grandpa was in World War II,
he fought against the Japanese.
He wrote a hundred letters to my grandma;
mailed ‘em from his base in the Philippines.

I wish they could see this now,
where they say this change can go.
Cause I was on a video chat this morning
with a company in Tokyo.

Paisley sings that the future is here today, that “wherever we thought we were going, we’re here”. On one hand this a paean to change, a valedictory anthem of progress. On the other, it’s a about a future that has arrived, a series of wrongs righted, and then completed. There’s no future future to Paisley’s view of the world.

Stevenson, who does clearly possess a sense of the future, but one often moored tightly (if not indefinitely) to the present and past, offers a similar collection of thoughts in his companion piece to his presentation at Webstock in New Zealand this year.
Stephenson is talking about the difficulty of translating our technical future-visions, which generally tend to be about discrete things, into compelling narrative-visions that engage the imagination and make the future something powerful and immersive. He lists five examples of future-things (all of which are emergent): cloud computing, web 2.0 and on into infinity, ubiquitous interfaces, spimes, and augmented reality. Then he combines them, and makes his point:

…She poured a coffee, then touched the breakfast table. “Where are my shoes?” “Your sister borrowed them.” “Again? Where is Susan?” “She’s downtown now.” “Susan! Why did you swipe my favorite shoes again?” “Look at this dress.” “Oooh, that dress is darling.” “It would look even better on you.” “You’re right. Get it for me. You can’t have it.” “Trade you for these shoes.” “Let me check that with Henry. Yeah, okay.” Karen had another sip of fair-trade coffee. It tasted weird, but it was still hot.”

They’re all in that paragraph. All five. They’re phantom far-out notions gobbled up by the real world. They packed in there so deep that nobody notices them. So, yes, I can write about it. It’s just: it doesn’t look futuristic. It looks way too real…

The future is here (or close enough), and it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter because it’s boring. Adding bits of present/future stuff together doesn’t make it a future you care about.

Stephenson and Paisley are articulating something important for those that care about the future and its role in our thinking about the present. The past can’t be our benchmark for the future, and the future isn’t about individual things or events or technologies. We have to go further afield, we have to look at the future, and at change, in broad strokes, in abstractions, in things that are not knowable or predictable. We have to imagine, and imagine freely.

This is not an easy message for many people concerned with the practicalities of change. How do I manage what’s coming? How do I plan for what I can’t see? What do I budget for it? The short answer, in absolute terms, to all of these questions is: you cannot. But how we choose to deal with that answer depends on how we approach change as a force. One way is typical, with fear. The other is less typical, with imagination.

Imagination engages our biological, slow, integrative change receptors. It short-circuits the feeling of being overwhelmed. A team with shared experience in collaborative imagination, with examining a range of futures – where change matters – isn’t disabled by fear. Instead, they see it not as an externality, but as integral part of what they do, and what the world does.

Therein lies our ability to explore futures that are anything but already here. Or banal.

Although perhaps less so than in the past, imagination has a pretty bad rap. It is seen as soft and unquantifiable. Its very lack of seemingly objective quantification often relegates it to the nursery rather than the boardroom. This is a mistake.

Imagination does what modeling cannot do. It opens up the future to possibility. It can, if used effectively, reach that summit of goal-oriented organizational thinkers concerned with the rapid change of the world: true out-of-the-box thinking. It can transform models into scenes, scenes into stories, and stories into tools. This last point is significant – modeling *is* important, but as an input, not an output.

There are at least two sorts of imagination that we encourage our clients to be on the lookout for. The first type is unconstrained, wild, outrageous. This sort is often only barely grounded in what is actually known about the present and modeled about the future. From this sort of imagination, outlier ideas can coalesce into something useful, occasionally powerful, and rarely (but possibly) transformative.

Unconstrained imagination is frequently at play in the work of novelists working on contemporaneously-sited fiction or far-future scifi. In both cases the result is often the same. We find ourselves sucked in, energized, and in a state of constant comparison: the described ‘reality’ against our own. In thinking about the future, unconstrained imagination is most useful for exploring the outer limits and unnoticed faces of the topic in question.

For example, an educational publishing company in the late 1990s was trying to make sense of a future that looked much less friendly to the traditional world of publisher, middleman, school district, teacher. By focusing on a willful ignorance of the way that world worked, the unconstrained imaginer was able to suggest a radical world of microcontent, microaudiences, and micromarkets that focused the company on what was truly important – not the process, but the content.

The other sort of imagination is disciplined. The key characteristics of this type are a certain boundedness, recognizability, and intuitive understanding. The disciplined imagination includes in its inputs not only an understanding of relevant trends (both macro and micro), but also existing forward-looking work like models, and oftentimes conversations with others thinking about the future of the topic. Despite the source information, the outputs can be quite extraordinarily divergent from what many might have anticipated seeing the inputs separately.

Disciplined imagination is most often found in historical fiction and near-term scifi. In both cases there are tendrils of understanding (and understandability) reaching out from the present to, in the first case, the past, and in the second, the future. While disciplined imagination often can create visions of the future that are immediately appreciable by those of us in the present, they – like modeling – cannot be seen as The Reality.

For instance, in the mid-2000s a private school, a bulwark of Southern California, was experiencing a profound shift in application and admission patterns, ones that suggested a very different future than their 100+ year history. Relying on an understanding of technological, environmental, demographic, and economic trends, the disciplined imaginer created a series of perspectives that helped the school’s officials and trustees revision the future of the school and build in the flexibility to respond to changes. Their horizon was 2050.

How then to best incorporate imagination into efforts to look sensibly forward? Three quick suggestions:

1. Recognize that the best results come from a judicious use of modeling, expert opinion, unconstrained imagination, and disciplined imagination. None alone can give you as full a picture as is possible with all working in concert. Of course, none or all, can guarantee a particular future.
2. Imagination’s best role is to suggest alternatives, and oftentimes much fuller alternatives than other methods. Develop a way to both encourage, and then capture the results of, imaginative exercises. Consider, as some of our clients have, videotaping, short story composition, roleplaying, and frenzied whiteboard sketching sessions.
3. Disciplined imaginers often come from within, or have invested significant time familiarizing themselves with the issues; unconstrained imaginers often come from ancillary areas or disciplines. Develop a quick question to identify these folks, something like: “It’s 2030 – what does X look like?”. The answer to that question will reveal both an imaginer and a type.

There are a number of techniques for working with imagination, both unconstrained and disciplined, but the most important first step is to make room for it. If the goal of looking towards the future is preparation, and preparation for what is ultimately unknown, then imagination offers a valuable tool for suggesting parameters – perhaps not all the parameters, maybe not even any of The Parameters, but ways of thinking about and anticipating parameters.