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.

Building and nurturing organizations that are sensitive to both sorts of change (and what happens between them) is arguably the most important task a leader has. It is, of course, made vastly more complicated, difficult, and downright confounding when we face up to the prickly fact that change often comes from places we don’t anticipate (or…if it does, its manifestation isn’t at all what we supposed).

A useful exercise for any group (although individuals can reap some benefits from it as well) is a mental stretch called ‘coffeehouse’. A little background: although known in Turkey and elsewhere for a couple of hundred years previously, it wasn’t until the mid-17C that England got its first coffeehouse of any note. A hundred years later there were well over 500 of them in London itself. The story isn’t the near Starbuckian spread of nouveau coffee proprietors and their dens of caffeinated city folk), but rather the change catalyzed by their very existence. For instance, the coffeehouse sits at the beginning of – among other things – the insurance business, the stock market, and the encyclopedia. In addition, of course, coffeehouses also offered one of the greatest bastions of democratic assembly in the early modern period, something that would on to quite literally transfigure the world.

So, ‘coffeehouse’ is an exercise in exploring possible unintended consequences and then bringing into focus ways in which your individual enterprise might be affected by this change. Here’s how it works: gather a group (4-6 is ideal) and postulate an absolutely far reaching and hardly imaginable change in an industry completely separate from yours (if you’re in paper think farming, in farming think fashion). Map out together the possible effects, drawing closer and closer to those that would impact your stakeholder’s stakeholders, then your stakeholders, and finally you. Ultimately, as you’ll see, you’re collectively exploring an answer to what almost might be called The Question: how does change, that I can’t even see, affect everything I do, every day?

There are many, many coffeehouses out there, and a regular effort to explore ways of thinking about them – even if you’re not addressing the particular one you’ll see next – incorporates a central tenant of both futures thinking and risk management: change is inevitable, your response is not.

In our work, we constantly struggle to use language as a tool to communicate, rather than simply as an artifact to convey that work of some sort has happened. Often this means that we must struggle to define a grammar and vocabulary for our clients that is effective but not foreign. And, occasionally, we find that only once you’ve spent a significant amount of time and energy around a concept embodied in a particular word do you realize you no longer believe in the power of that word to express what is really going on. “Sustainability” is one such word.

Sustainability is used contemporaneously to describe an approach, primarily to the environment, but often to larger social issues, that emphasizes conservation, remediation, and prevention. It has been embraced primarily by companies seeking a way to respond to the growing social, political, and occasionally economic incentives to examine the effects business-as-usual have on the communities and ecosystems within which those companies are embedded.

Regardless of whether or not companies ought to be concerned with larger environmental or social issues, and I think it is unequivocally the case that they should, I’ve come to believe that we’ve been operating in the wrong frame. In fact, I think much of the current disagreement about what to do about climate change and global warming has less to do with fundamentals (although I don’t deny there continue to be seemingly unbridgeable gaps between parties), and much more with how we’ve constructed the dialogue, or if you prefer, the argument.

Here’s where we return to the importance of language. It can’t be about “sustainability”. Companies are, by their very nature, concerned about sustainability: they always have been. They are perhaps much more aware than many of their erstwhile detractors of the need to ensure that the resources they depend on continue to be available. Coke, or Nestle, or Unilever know very well the dangers of diminishing or unusable water supplies. It may be true, that for them it is not necessarily about quality of life for people living along rivers or over aquifers, but rather whether or not they can continue to profitably do what they do. The effect, however, is much the same.

Companies, markets, nations don’t succeed by simply sustaining. It’s the wrong word – it’s the wrong idea.

It is a challenging time on many fronts, and the language we use to describe those challenges and our responses to them will either create shared meaning and endeavor or misunderstanding and divisiveness. Instead of the misunderstood, misappropriated, and misused term of sustainability, perhaps instead we ought to focus on adaptability and resilience as our common touchstones.

Adaptability is a well-understood word, meaning to be able to adjust to new circumstances or conditions. It has been applied frequently to describe (among other things) American business’s approach to innovation, to changing market conditions, and to social pressures. The Internet, globalism, and the green movement are all perfectly good examples. Climate change and global warming represent another and new variable for businesses looking seriously at adapting for their future.

Unlike sustainability, which has mostly been about mitigation and cessation, adaptability suggests reinvention, innovation, new ways to accomplish new things. CEOs the world over know that their adaptability in the face of changing circumstances and an uncertain future will determine which companies are winners and which are losers.

Resilience, similarly, is the capacity to withstand and recover from difficult conditions, again something American business has demonstrated its ability to do time and time again. Changing environmental conditions and the attendant pressures such changes will place on the way companies do business, and on their customers, will require enormous resilience.

While sustainability downplays the power of resistance and recovery and submits both to unwavering external forces, resilience offers a way to accommodate, integrate, and then transform circumstances from possible – even probable – failure to success. Corporate leaders know the power of resilience, and – with some notable exceptions – have been building organizations that can respond quickly and successfully to external pressure.

Climate change and global warming will force companies to be both adaptable and resilient, perhaps on a scale – both temporally and economically – greater than ever before. Interestingly, adaptability and resilience are what we look for in ecosystems to determine if they are healthy. They serve as indicators of systems in balance. And unlike sustainability, both resilience and adaptability are open-ended and unconstrained. They don’t suggest anything other than successful evolution. Indeed, if companies were universally both resilient and adaptable, the world would be considerably better off than status quo.

Adaptability and resilience don’t offer, it is true, as pithy a term as sustainability. But, at the same time, they don’t obfuscate, don’t misdirect, and they do point towards what is truly needed. And, in these times, a little more subtly and a little more shared meaning, even at the cost of a couple of more words, is probably a good thing.

Building a business plan to support a new policy, particularly one that is distinct from status quo, has to be responsive to this orientation while still providing an actionable roadmap. We’ve found the best way to manage the enormous financial, political, and frequent social risk that new policy development entails is through the identification and use of trend clusters.

Trend clusters are the result of broad-spectrum environmental and narrow-band industry scanning. Current trends coalesce into clusters that then drive the emergence of new trends that become instrumental in the policy’s successful realization.

Instead of focusing on a policy’s desired end state, we build policy business plans with an eye towards these policy-rich intermediate clusters of trends in the short and medium term. This orientation manages risk, while allowing policy makers greater flexibility to adjust targets and intentions in response to emerging trends (whether political, economic, social, or technological).

The result is a policy process more sensitive to change and thus more likely to affect the sort of change desired by its advocates.

There is a recent Pinyon white paper [pdf] on this approach, and I’d recommend a quick read if you’re interested.

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.

1. Wetland management – Gradually rising sea levels, although not as dramatic as expected at the early part of the century, began having noticeable impact by 2025. The early concerns about the loss of wetlands to development and flood control lessened initially as the wetlands reconstituted in some places and grew larger in others. By 2040, however, tensions between metropolitan sea level managers in cities like Miami, New Orleans, Tampa, New York, Boston, and San Diego and proponents of so-called natural control had intensified. Over the next ten years, both sides turned – mostly unsuccessfully – to the courts and legislatures in an effort to meet the growing challenges. Late in 2049, after two years of quiet but universally praised work, the President’s Panel on Rising Sea Levels (known by almost everybody as The Flood Commission) issued their report. First among the 312 recommendations was the critical need for a federal response.

2. Electricity markets – When Tangier – the Cisco/Edison Power joint venture – completed regional testing of its new grid in 2017, the most noticeable result was not that the grid had worked, but the virtual marketplace that had grown out of the venture’s social marketing efforts. By 2031, 3/4 of the country was in a position to market electricity back to providers, and the virtual marketplaces that had so captured the attention of the media and pundits in the 20s, had morphed into fully operational exchanges. As renewables and nontraditionals were integrated, the exchanges moved beyond the buying and selling of kWh to futures and derivatives. In November 2048, four traders working out of AllianZ’s offices in Des Moines – responding to internal modeling data -  began shorting the nuclear transmission market. One of the traders – a late hire to the firm – leaked the action to his local exchange. Hundreds of thousands of households dumped nuctrans credits, sending the market into a spiral. After three days of turmoil, with plants burning off excess energy, and the national reserve teetering on unsustainable, the SEC called a halt to the markets. Independent analysis failed to predict a way to safely reopen over the New Year holiday, and by ’49 it was clear that a different sort of regulation was necessary – able to balance the energy needs of the country with the embedded market.

3. Internal migration – Although Palm Springs had been suffering since the conservation acts of 2021, strict water reuse programs and the award to the city of the first NatEnviro landscaping certification in California for its wide-scale xenoscaping had done much to ensure continued prosperity. When the Western Fires began in 2039, the citizens watched as town after town across the southwest was consumed. The acres of dead vegetation, harvested after the passage of the conservation acts, had been used for sand and dust dampening. As gray water sources diminished, the already depleted fresh water aquifers simply couldn’t keep up. By October, huge sections of the region had been depopulated. On November 3rd, Palm Springs evacuated. Former residents fleeing to cities further north, and further east, found themselves in communities of refugees from floods and fires along the coasts. Social services began to crumble. By the late ’40s, cities found themselves unable to support the additional population, and federal action was called for.

4. Water management – While the resurgence in rural living during the ’20s and ’30s (see below) had done much to reduce the water strain on individual cities, regional disparities increased as water tables over the west dropped, and those in the east grew. In April of 2043, the $220B Roanoke-Little Rock transregional aqueduct finally opened, proving the viability of large scale transport projects. Despite Belcorps’s assurance that four similar projects were shovel ready, the US Regional Water Authorities looked to the President for authorization to proceed. The Supreme Court ruling in Kingston v. Oklahoma in June of 2044 overturned Kelo, and required state and local governments to demonstrate critical local need before appropriating land. The Hay Bale demonstrations – pitting farmers against construction crews – had convinced some members of Congress that aqueduct off-flow channels ought to be considered for those areas through which it passed. With another record drought predicted for the Summer of 2050, consensus throughout Washington and in state capitals across the country was that better solutions were needed.

5. Rural revitalization – After experiencing a virtual depopulation in the latter half of the 20th Century and early years of the 21st, rural America began to experience a rebirth in the early 2020s. Initially driven by the economic meltdown in the last years of the century’s first decade, and business’s efforts to cut costs, telecommuting workers found lower costs and a better quality of life further away from the cities. Once the private energy markets were established and functioning in the late ’20s and early ’30s, and personal renewable energy production became not only viable but potentially profitable, large numbers of Americans undertook what became known colloquially as the “return to the farm”. By the mid-2040s however, it became increasingly clear that there was insufficient infrastructure, either physical or services, to handle the increasing population. Fearing another more virulent outbreak of malaria with the coming summer heat, local and federal authorities declared their intention to come together in February of 2050 to draw up a blueprint for the new ruralism.

There is a strong correlation between levels of education and economic performance of a country (see chart below), and this will continue to strengthen as progress is continually redefined along the upper right quadrant of the axes of knowledge and services. Paying for academic performance and participation is an indication of two seemingly opposed forces. Firstly, there is the globalizing prejudice towards market solutions. The current economic downturn will slow this, but only temporarily. Secondly, there is an internal state planning or management calculus at work that incorporates education into the basic managed components – like health care or military service – of a nation’s or community’s place in the world.

More broadly, we will continue to see increasing experimentation with economic-oriented solutions to social and civic concerns. These experiments are likely to be driven by two strong forces: 1) a recognition that economic motivation works, often where social and community pressure fails, and 2) as the market continues to exert influence on transparency and equity, a desire for an appreciable, quantifiable, and demonstrable return on investment.

Futurists make their bones (as well as their daily bread) with trends. Identifying, understanding, contexualizing, and helping others explore trends is what we do, whether we do it for clients, colleagues, or the public. Merriam-Webster’s various definitions for trend all come back to movement over time. We pay attention to trends, to the movement of ideas, technologies, inclinations, and cultures over time in an effort not to predict the future, but to define a sphere of inquiry and imagination (another word that has gotten a bad wrap recently). At the same time we train ourselves to anticipate not only the possibility, but the probability, that something we’re not even watching, or doesn’t exist, will suddenly change the game entirely.

The thing with trends, of course, is that they are many. Many won’t have significant impact at all on the things we study. But the future, like the present and the past, is a systems affair. The point isn’t in significance per se, but in influence. And it is here that even the trendy matters. For instance, the iPhone was (still is?) trendy in a sort of ‘let’s laugh at the the too cool crowd’ way, but at the same time it represents potentially dramatic and influential trends (e.g. information ubiquity, social omnipresence, human-machine interface).

It’s easy for serious people talking about serious things to want to stay away from the trendy, even if it might be really important. But trends are another matter entirely.

An exercise: take something unimaginably trendy (but not the iPhone since we’ve already done that), and think about what else it might have to say about where we might be going. Extra points if you can work something out for Rock of Love Bus.

In a pre-globalized market it was easy enough to seek incremental gains during troubling periods because the stakes were similar among most players, or groups of players.  There was a shared sense of situation, and a determined desire to get through it and then back to the business of doing business, of competing.  There were price wars, new features, and the like, but the focus was on survival.

Globalism introduced the common goal of trade and growth.  The point of a globalised economy was the search to connect goods and services with buyers at the best possible price point.  But here’s the catch: the stakes between the players are vastly different.  Developing countries can’t afford to hunker down.  Nobody is going to retreat; the stakes are too high.  This is a lesson that developed nations have to learn.

According to OECD, only the US government spends more on innovation than the Chinese.  Chinese nanotech parks, solar research facilities, and even US funded R&D projects may slow down, but China understands that it can’t afford to ‘wait it out’. Likewise, India, with both its indigenous innovation programs and those it supports from abroad, isn’t in a position to see what happens.  Elsewhere?  Much the same.  In a globalized market, regardless of the economic situation, the innovation imperative holds sway.

The challenge for developed nations is two-fold: first, recognizing the overwhelming need to grow the economy, it’s important to resist the urge to sit it out and wait for things to get better, and second, absent the more immediate requirements of energy security – particularly with petroleum around $50/barrel – assuming that there are more important things on which to spend any limited available funds is false.   This challenge, then, is ultimately about leadership.

Only strong leadership from government or industry can provide the incentive for citizens and shareholders to accept that it is not enough to just survive.   As developed nations and their leaders look forward to the new year, one that’s not likely to see an economic uptick until sometime Q3 or Q4, they must keep one eye on where they need to be, and one eye on a market that’s not likely to tolerate their half-hearted participation.