GenZ must embody foresight principles to save our future
It’s time for us Gen Z to take ownership of our collective future. We can claim our preferred futures by practicing foresight.
Sustainable foresight is a diversity and inclusion practice of collaborative sense-making — watching society’s ripples collide and change and strategizing a response. PC: Jordan McDonald via Unsplash
A nervous 19 year-old sat at a round table in a conference ballroom with dozens of industry professionals. There were name tags, tables of snacks, and plenty of jokes that went over her head. She aligned her notebook and pen with her place-setting, and mentally reminded herself to sit straight. This workshop was the Big Leagues, but she was just a Little Girl. Even though her mom was presenting, despite having heard about the subject matter around the house, the girl had zero idea what’s going on.
That was until she read this slide.
PC: The Futures School dba TFSX
How we think about the future directly impacts the decisions we make today.
I was the self-deprecating teen whose future opened up when that slide flashed on the screen. My training that day as a young adult and the work with The Futures School that followed became the pillars of my career in sustainability. It all surrounded this core idea —whether we’re optimistic or pessimistic, whether we claim our agency or surrender into helplessness, our perceptions about the future subconsciously drive our actions. When it comes to the future, you become what you think.
The Universal Red Car.
The future is created, whether or not we consciously direct it. Everyone has their own future— parents, politicians, celebrities… all of us create our future through decisions.
In addition, there are multiple possible, preferred, provocative futures (plural) ahead of us. Similar to the metaverse, there are infinite realities that lie in our collective path. It is in our capacity to have empathy for our future selves and use those insights to walk towards preferred futures.
Humans’ creative capacity for the future, and the multitude of futures that lie ahead, together are futures thinking principles 101. Education around these concepts is known as futures literacy. I’m writing this in hopes that futures literacy becomes the driving force of our generation.
Together Fred Polak’s Image of the Future + Joseph Voros’ Cone of Possibilities provide a conceptual outline for futures literacy.
You might be thinking, “okay, but so what, Ash? We can’t just be optimistic and then the future will be better, or else we’d already have done that”.
Yes, cynicism is warranted and totally understandable. We are in a hot mess cluster f*ck (speaking as a privileged, yet scared American). A large part of why we’re in this hot mess is precisely because we have not leaned into our collective ability to practice foresight, empathy, and sustainability. We have allowed our unchecked biases to release technological genies from their bottles, oligarchical Pandora’s boxes to be unleashed, and colonialist narratives to be whitewashed.
This is the part where I come in with some “wokeness” to dilineate something not quite well-outlined in the foresight and futures communities— foresight practiced without decolonization, well-being, and ecological rewilding embedded into preferred futures is a sorry excuse to perpetuate exploitation for the sake of profit. I’ll say it louder for the people in the back. If you’re only doing foresight to make more money in the future, you’re doing it wrong. If your priority for foresight is convenience over unlearning, you’re missing the point.
Sustainable foresight is not always economically sustainable. Your economics are based on yesterday’s projections and therefore are rooted in the past. To truly break-free into futures unknown, we have to do what everyone thinks is impossible and move past capitalism.
Founder Ash Bowers speaking at Soularly’s Launch Party about the need to mobilize our communities to start acting on our preferred futures.
At Soularly’s launch party, I asked guests to conduct a three-part “Where do you stand” ice-breaker to illustrate how foresight can be illuminating even in a casual setting. The first sketch pad asked folks “where they stand” on a quadrant grid: do they feel they have more / less agency with the future; do they feel optimistic / pessimistic about the future. Next they took time exploring the Quantum Consciousness Pattern Mural. The final flip chart prompted reflection on their original response to decide if they’d change it or if their response is the same after viewing the pattern.
The magic of foresight is not in its output, it’s in its process — the conversations I had that night where I hit “publish” on this website were astounding. I love my friends and we always get deep in our discussions, mostly because I’m not someone who dabbles in small talk. But it was on this evening that the true power of foresight revealed itself to me. We won’t create a better future if we don’t even talk about what it is we want to see. What are the problems keeping us up at night? What do we want for our kids and grandkids?
I’m not willing to allow unfettered capitalism to continue raining on my daily parade. Quite the opposite, I’m willing— using my human gifts will-power and creativity— to decide to create a better future.
Soularly is about facilitating connection. There are hundreds if not thousands of groups and organizations who are fighting the Good Fight, several are likely headquartered in your locality. There’s community gardens, wellness collectives, and non-profits of all kinds. If you know of such organizations, share them at our next Town Hall.
The first step to create a more sustainable reality for all, is to imagine one.
