Abstract
A commentary after twenty years by the author of “Making the Future Visible,” written in 1999 and previously only circulated informally. Expanding on the idea of a “psychological landscape of the future” proposed in the 1999 paper, the author recalls the background and motivation for the original paper, and proposes that there are three psychologically distinct types of future—Cognitive, Affective, and Conative—each of which should be developed in any futures work intended to lead to strategic action. The identification and development of these three types of future also provides a means of resolving the so-called “scenarios to strategy problem.”
In September 1999, when I was living and working in Australia, I was invited to give a presentation to the Australian Public Service Futures Group in Canberra on how to think about the future. I wrote an accompanying paper titled, Making the Future Visible: Psychology, Scenarios and Strategy which was circulated privately and via Global Business Network (GBN) in California. Over the years since, I have received consistently positive feedback about this paper, despite the fact that it has never been formally published until now—in this issue of this journal.
I began doing futures consulting work in the early 1990s at GBN, using their version of the Shell scenarios method. Scenario work was becoming extremely popular yet it struck me as somewhat incomplete. In particular, the transition from scenario thinking to strategy formulation was inadequately explained and was often referred to as the “scenarios to strategy problem.” My remarks in 1999 therefore reflected my own frustrations with scenarios, and were an attempt to propose a broader framework for thinking about the future.
This paper is a personal reflection on the themes of the 1999 paper, revisiting them after twenty years. In it I explore and expand on the idea that the future, and indeed time itself, may be best understood by appreciating how we relate to it psychologically. This leads to the idea that from a psychological point of view there are three types of future, corresponding to the three primary dimensions of mental functioning. In conclusion, it then follows that futures research methods should address all three psychological dimensions of the future if they hope to be effective in shaping future-directed human action.
The Future as a Psychological Landscape
The main innovation of the 1999 paper, which I still rely on in my work as a futurist, was the notion of viewing the future as a psychological landscape, containing a symbolic representation of: the strategic actor; the actor’s hopes, fears, and expectations about the future strategic environment; and their aspiration and ambition for the future. Most futures methods consider one or other of these, but struggle to depict them all in the same place. As the celebrated scientist Desmond Bernal put it in 1929, “There are two sets of futures, the future of fate and the future of desire, and man’s reason has never learned to separate them” (Bernal 1929). He might have added a third future: the future of resolve—the future toward which we focus our intention and efforts.
Scenarios aim to reveal the future(s) of fate or what Bernal called “that which inevitably will happen” which will play out on the Chessboard part of the psychological landscape. My hope was, in effect, to bring that into a clearer relationship with the future of desire and the future of resolve.
This led to another key aspect of the paper, its observations about the paradoxical value of uncertainty. From a psychological point of view, we are suspended between the wish to know and the wish to be free. The tension between wanting to depend on external certainty and the need to act from internal conviction is fundamental, and I suggested that our best response is to achieve clarity about the main features of the future by seeing it as a psychological landscape.
Scenarios and the Psychology of Uncertainty
Scenarios are typically presented as a tool based on uncertainty, and require a practitioner to focus attention on strategic uncertainty. This emphasis is initially counterintuitive as most people look to futures work to give them greater certainty about the future. It is also true that Pierre Wack, in his HBR articles on Shell’s scenario work (Wack 1985), had primarily emphasized the need to identify “predetermined elements,” but for the most part GBN-style scenario work resulted in a neat 2 × 2 matrix framed by two moderately alarming uncertainties, allowing the scenario user to ask exploratory “what if?” questions. The much more serious intellectual effort required to produce what Pierre called “decision scenarios” was generally neglected.
As I discovered, an unrelenting focus on uncertainty leads to an unbalanced psychological approach because it is disconnected from the task of deciding what to do, and runs counter to the desire of decision-makers to “take a view.” Shell had decreed an internal separation between its scenario team and its strategy team, to pit them against each other intellectually, and GBN—founded as it was by Shell insiders—had mirrored this by focusing almost entirely on scenarios. From my point of view as a GBN scenario practitioner this was frustrating, because I felt that scenarios should be part of some larger framework that would include intention towards the future in addition to an enhanced appreciation of uncertainty. My paper on the future as a psychological landscape was an attempt to outline that larger whole.
GBN’s method—which by 1999 had become the dominant business scenario method—was an island of activity standing awkwardly apart from strategic thinking. The best GBN could offer for bridging the scenarios-to-strategy divide was the idea of “wind tunneling,” in which scenarios served by analogy as wind tunnels, notionally allowing strategic options to be tested as if they were prototype aircraft, to “see if they would fly.” Some clients did use the scenarios as strategic test environments, but all too often the scenarios simply served as an end in themselves.
Ultimately, although they emphasized uncertainty to counter the false certainty of prediction, scenarios did not live up to their promise and this proved to be their undoing. They were supposed to capture the range of possible futures, and reduce or even eliminate future shock. Unfortunately, the 2007 to 2011 global financial crisis failed to appear in advance on the radar screen of most scenario work, or if it did it was rejected as implausible. The unsurprising result was that the popularity of scenarios plunged in the wake of the crisis. According to management surveys by Bain & Company, the use of scenarios has fallen by 75% from its peak level in 2007 (Bain & Company 2018).
The usual rationale for scenarios was that embracing uncertainty would be an effective way to face the future, sensitizing decision makers to increasing turbulence in the strategic environment and reducing surprise by substantially capturing the whole range of what could happen. As the global financial crisis showed, the fatal flaw was psychological. Very often, decision makers were unwilling to look at the full range of possibility, not because they were clinging to a single point forecast, but because they were limiting the range of acceptable scenarios to ones that clustered around established beliefs about the future.
In short, knowing intellectually that there is uncertainty about the future does not eliminate conscious and unconscious resistance to facing the uncertainty itself. This requires a degree of openness to outcomes that is in tension with the closure needed to reach a decision on a practical course of action. The tension between openness and closure lies at the heart of the “scenarios to strategy problem.”
The fading popularity of scenarios opens up the question of what might take their place. There is no shortage of futures methods, though none have achieved the popularity scenarios had during their heyday in the 1990s. The current enthusiasm is for notions of strategic agility, complex problem solving, and design thinking. Nevertheless, the need for genuine anticipatory strategic thinking is undiminished.
The Psychological Experience of Time
The essence of strategy is action taken in the present with the aim of achieving an improved outcome later, possibly a lot later. It is pragmatism projected into the future, the epitome of delayed gratification. Given that working with the future is common to both strategy and futures studies, a deeper consideration of time might provide a way to link them more effectively.
After writing the 1999 paper I had the feeling that I was one step away from some deeper insight into the nature of time. It was not clear how to take that extra step, though I did think that a closer look at the physics and psychology of time ought to yield useful clues. It struck me that a well-grounded futures praxis should be based on our best collective understanding of time, whereas most futures research methods appeared to be grounded in a conception of time derived from classical physics.
The world of Newtonian physics treats time as an extended number line that translates neatly into an axis in a Cartesian coordinate space. The past lies in one direction, the future in the other, and the point representing the present moves along at an absolutely steady rate. The notion of time as a linear flow of measurable moments is a very useful assumption, or more precisely a very ingenious invention, which made possible scientific equations of force and motion and the subsequent development of classical physics.
In 1641, the year before Newton’s birth, the philosopher Descartes had divided the world into two categories, res extensa, physical things that have extension (length or duration) and can be measured, and mental phenomena, res cogitans, the things of thought that cannot be measured (Descartes 1641). Time was taken to be part of the physical world, in which case it was one of the res extensa. The invention of clocks combined with the idea of time as a number line allowed time to be both measured and analyzed mathematically. This was a neat trick, because it allowed scientists to regard time as a purely physical phenomenon, indeed as a fundamental feature of the physical world.
Clocks were invented as a way of measuring time, but strictly speaking this is not what they do—they are simply machines that change consistently in the most regular possible way. Even the most sophisticated clocks do not work by detecting and measuring time itself, since we have no means of doing this nor even any idea how to do it.
Not only is time physically undetectable, but according to the most advanced theories in physics it does not stay the same for all observers, and may not even exist at all. This goes back to Einstein’s realization that time is relative and variable, not fixed and absolute as Newton thought. The idea of regular linear time is like a conceptual ladder that science has climbed only to discover that it no longer applies in the rarefied realms of relativity and quantum physics.
So at our present level of scientific knowledge, time itself is both theoretically problematic and eludes direct measurement. This leaves us with the realization that we are only directly aware of time within consciousness. Perhaps we might make more progress now by regarding time as one of Descartes’ res cogitans, in place of the apparently common-sensical assumption that it is one of the res extensa.
It is therefore worth looking at time as a mental or psychological phenomenon to see what insights this can offer. One way to approach this is through phenomenology—roughly the study of phenomena as they appear in consciousness. Within conscious awareness, the time is always now, never past or future, and within this now conditions are endlessly changing. Paying attention to being fully present in the now carries with it an experience of continuously drawn out duration, analogous to an endlessly stretched piece of elastic, as the French philosopher Henri Bergson put it in his celebrated theory of time (Bergson 1992 [1946]).
The experience of “time present” is immediate and real in consciousness, but the future and the past are never experienced directly. When we were in the past, we experienced it as the present. When we will be in the future, it too will be the present. The notion of the future is therefore—among other things—a psychological and cultural construct. It is always receding, like the horizon.
There are some striking examples showing that concepts of past and future are culturally dependent. For example, some pre-industrial cultures have no linear time orientation—such as the Hopi Native Americans in Arizona, whose language has no verb tenses or linear conception of time (Peat 2002). In contrast, the time experience of industrial cultures is imposed by clock time, and includes a well-developed sense of past followed by future.
If the idea of the future—and of the past—is to some degree a cultural invention then it must serve some useful function in our present society. A picture of the future acts as a mental mirror that reflects back the potential consequences of possible choices and actions. This recursive role allows us to weigh our options in the light of what we know about the functioning of our environment. If we have an action in mind we can play it out imaginatively in the future we expect, to see whether it has any undesirable consequences. We may also learn directly from the future we expect, as we choose to mitigate or enhance aspects of what might happen. And our ability to form intentions depends partly on our ability to form a picture of a desired future. In each case, forming an image of the future helps to improve the quality of choices in the present, which seems to be the basic cultural function of the future.
In 1985, D. H. Ingvar presented evidence that, as he expressed it, “concepts about the future, like memories of past events, can be remembered, often in great detail” and that specific brain regions are responsible for “memory for the future.” The evidence indicated, he said, that regions in the prefrontal cortex of the brain play an important role in the planning, anticipation and programing of complex sequences of action, involving “memory for the future.” Since that time, research has shown that these memories of the future involve the same brain areas that are responsible for memories of the past. The processes of remembering the past and imagining the future are both associated with a specific core brain system, which flexibly recombines details from past events and makes them available for the simulation of future events (Schacter et al. 2007)
In effect, our brains routinely carry out the main activities associated with futures research. If the concept of the future is a cultural construct, how can this be explained? Does culture gradually discover features of the brain that already exist, or do brain processes develop to accommodate increasing cultural complexity? Either way, it appears that new time concepts do emerge as culture evolves, and it seems reasonable to assume that they would correspond to the demand for improved anticipatory ability as the consequences of society’s actions become more complex and extend further into the future.
In my 1999 paper I suggested that it could be helpful to view the future as a psychological landscape, as the basis for an expanded framework for relating to the future. What I would like to suggest now is that this framework can be formalized into a cultural time concept that expands the idea of the future itself, and that this might help bridge the scenarios to strategy divide.
The Future as a Threefold Psychological Construct
My proposed psychological landscape of the future was portrayed in the “Star, Mountain, Chessboard, Self” diagram that appeared in the paper. The features of the landscape were intended to represent the main ways in which we relate to the future psychologically.
There is a long history in philosophy and psychology of regarding the mind as having three aspects, identified as cognitive (related to thought and belief), affective (related to emotion and feeling), and conative (related to will, intention and action). One early twentieth century psychologist who employed these categories was William McDougall (1871–1938), who described “the three aspects of all mental process” as: cognitive, “knowing of something”; affective, “feeling in regard to it”; and conation, “striving towards or away from that object” (Hilgard 1980). In contemporary psychology these three categories feature in the theory of reasoned action (TRA) which is widely used in social science and psychological research. TRA theorizes that a person’s beliefs, attitudes and intentions combine to shape their behavior (Fishbein and Ajzen 1975). Similarly, theory of mind (ToM) research explores the way people attribute mental states such as beliefs, desires, and intentions to others (Premack and Woodruff 1978).
In my 1999 paper I therefore identified the psychological dimensions of the future as cognitive, affective, and conative. The landscape elements correspondingly symbolized anticipation, aspiration, and intention as modes of relating to the future. The Self at the bottom of the diagram represented the self-knowledge of the organization and the key values and competencies associated with its work, as well as features of its culture. The Chessboard represented the future (and past and present) of the operating environment, the event-full future context in which action will play out. The Star and the Mountain represented two aspects of the future role image of the organization. The Star was the long term, enduring purpose of the organization and the Mountain was the major strategic objective the organization sets for the medium to long term.
This way of interpreting the landscape relates each psychological dimension to an aspect of the self’s interaction with the external world. A complementary approach would be to consider each component of the landscape in terms of the way it is represented mentally or psychologically. In this case, the features of the landscape would refer to mental images of futures we expect, feel strongly about, or act on. Since the landscape represents the future, these are images of the future, but they are characteristically distinct types of image because they are associated with three very different mental modes.
From a psychological point of view, therefore, it becomes apparent that there is more than one kind of future. The future shifts from being a single undifferentiated concept to being a threefold psychological construct. The value of the landscape is that it can help us to identify and consciously work with the three different types of future.
The Chessboard, Star, and Mountain can then be seen as symbols for the cognitive, affective, and conative mental images generated by the Self as it interacts with the world, and represent what it learns and decides about the different psychologically significant ways of relating to the future.
Cognitive future images depict or represent projective or extrapolative thinking about the future. They consist of pictures of the future that arise from thinking about current conditions and where they could lead, often by picking up on weak signals of nascent issues. The psychological significance of cognitive images is that they represent the acquisition of knowledge and understanding, through logical and speculative thought about the future.
Affective future images depict or represent our emotional responses to alternative conceptions of the future. They consist of our awareness of futures we desire and futures we wish to avoid, based on our emotional preferences. Our preferences bring into focus pictures of desirable future states, as a creative response to future difficulties seen in the cognitive image. They may include visionary ideas that involve ideal solutions, inventive concepts, and opportunities for transformation. The psychological significance of affective images is that they represent preferences and desires, often expressed as ideal outcomes and preferred solutions. In emotional terms they relate to motivation, optimism, and hope, as well as a recognition of aversion, pessimism, and negativity.
Conative future images depict or represent our purposive focus on the future. They are images of an achievable state of the future selected by the Self that combine innovative ideas from affective images with needs, capabilities, and resources found in cognitive images. They represent a goal or target future arising from an interplay between cognitive and affective images that forms the future focus of intention and the will power of the Self.
To summarize, the Chessboard, Star, and Mountain still relate, as before, to different psychological dimensions—the cognitive, affective, and conative—but in this complementary interpretation they represent categories of mental image of the future. This represents a shift from regarding the future as simply the abstract forward direction on a number line of time, to regarding it as actually consisting of three psychologically significant classes or categories of mental image. The future is recast from being a neutral projective space to being a multimodal psychological construct. And when interpreted this way, the “future as a psychological landscape” transforms from being a useful metaphor when thinking about the future, to being a direct depiction of the psychological nature of the future.
Before looking at how this might be useful in practice, it is worth exploring the three types of future in more detail.
The Cognitive Future
The Chessboard is the domain of the Cognitive Future, which is equivalent to what Desmond Bernal called the “future of fate.” It represents the “future in prospect”—the array of possible future developments arising from an unfolding of present conditions without any attempted influence by the Self. It is a psychologically distinct category of future that consists of projected or forecast images of the future, and includes both possible and probable futures. It contains all or part of the world problématique—the total complex of challenges and issues associated with the global future. In technical terms, it represents projective or extrapolative thinking about the future—which of course does not always reveal a problematic future, but when future problems are anticipated they do usually come from projecting existing conditions and trends forward. In psychological terms it arises from cognitive activity—ideas and knowledge derived from thinking about the future. Its usefulness is that it highlights potential challenges, including difficulties, problems, and threats, which may also take the form of “upside shocks”—unanticipated positive developments.
The Cognitive Future, the future of fate, is where many if not most futures research methods are focused. Scenarios are a means of portraying various anticipated or possible states of the operating environment, and the Cognitive Future is typically depicted using scenarios.
Scenarios are intrinsically multiple, in contrast with the idea of the future in classical physics, in which the future is envisaged as singular. The Cognitive Future is closer to the idea of the future in quantum physics. In quantum theory it is not possible to obtain precise predictions for future states at the atomic size scale, but only to obtain probabilities, which co-exist as superposed possible future outcomes. This corresponds conceptually with the idea of multiple future scenarios. Indeed, I remember the former academic philosopher Jay Ogilvy, one of the founders of GBN, proposing that the role of uncertainty in scenarios reflects the principle of quantum uncertainty.
On the other hand, and somewhat inconsistently, the search for “driving forces” in scenario work is essentially Newtonian. According to classical physical thinking, mechanical forces cause reality to move in the direction of one future or another, more or less in the way that on a billiard table the state of play emerges from collisions among the balls (with the “driving force” in this case being the billiard cue). The idea is that a single mechanistically-determined future emerges continuously without counter-factual alternatives existing in any real sense. This is fundamentally different from quantum thinking, in which alternative futures develop side by side.
At the heart of quantum mechanics is a mathematical wave function, which enables the possible future states of a quantum system to be calculated as probabilities (the probability is found by squaring the amplitude of the wave function). The quantum wave function operates somewhat like a scenario machine that computes multiple future pathways for an atomic particle without specifying which one will become real. In a quantum experiment, the future probabilities for the position of a particle such as an electron can be calculated very precisely. But to find out which position turns out to be the real future, an observation must be made. The observation or measurement interrupts or “collapses” the unfolding probability wave and one potential future emerges as the real one, after which the wave function resets and begins evolving new probabilities. This collapse of probabilities is familiar from throwing a dice. Before the dice is thrown, the probabilities for each face being uppermost are equal, but after it is thrown the probabilities suddenly “collapse” leaving the uppermost face with a probability of one and the other faces with a probability of zero. The quantum wave function has no natural stopping point like a thrown dice, but the same effect is achieved whenever information is obtained about the state of the quantum system.
A key difference between the classical and quantum perspectives relates to causation, our understanding of what causes things to happen—which underlies any thinking about the Cognitive Future. Causation is an essentially mechanistic process in classical physics. One billiard ball collides with another and the mechanical transfer of force causes it to move. In quantum physics mechanical force is not seen as the determining factor. The future position of an atomic particle is determined in effect by the propagation of a probability wave, the shape of which is determined by the entire surrounding configuration of the world. Quantum theory is now almost one-hundred years old, and it is surprising that this new understanding of causation has had so little influence on strategy and futures work, as can be seen in the mechanistic flavor of much management theory about organizational change and strategic implementation.
What can perhaps be said is that the Cognitive Future, understood in the light of quantum theory, is a unity which contains multiplicity within it, somewhat as a hologram encodes a multitude of different angles of view of the same scene. Expressed in quantum terms, the quantum wave function encodes the potential for many different probable states, but only one of them actually presents itself to our awareness in the future. The term Cognitive Future is therefore singular because it is a single psychological category, but it embodies multiple possible future outcomes for the world and its subsystems.
The Affective Future
The Star signifies the Affective Future, which includes but is not limited to what Desmond Bernal called the “future of desire” and what is typically called the “preferred future.” It is a psychologically distinct category of future that arises from preferential bias about the future, based on emotions and feelings. In psychology, affect refers to the experience of emotional states, both positive and negative, desires as well as aversions. The feelings aroused by cognitive futures give rise to affective futures—which futures are regarded as optimistic and which pessimistic, which futures to work toward and which to work against.
The positive Affective Future consists of an image of a desired future state. At its best it is more than just the most desired scenario, rather it is a creative transformative vision for the future, which would not be predictable from the existing situation alone. In this sense it is more than just the most attractive cognitive future. It might depict a future in which radical pioneering changes have transformed the status quo in a desirable direction. It can be the result of blue sky thinking, and does not have to be probable—indeed aspects of it may not even be feasible given existing capabilities and technologies.
When the business thought leaders Joe Jaworski and Otto Scharmer carried out wide-ranging research into the new shape of leadership, which led to Otto Scharmer’s “Theory U,” they came to the view that “leaders have to develop. . .the capacity to sense and actualize emerging futures” (Jaworski, and Scharmer 2000).
This suggests that depicting the future of desire is about more than identifying “the future you desire” but also about sensing what the system as a whole “desires.” The possibility of sensing emerging futures implies there is a kind of creative developmental tendency in the system as a whole which can be detected, and that this is different from simply extrapolating past states of the system. Arguably, it is equivalent to a collective future desire which arises from the aggregate needs of all the participants in the system, even though it may not correspond to the future individually desired by any one participant. Detecting or sensing it therefore requires a form of appreciative inquiry, possibly even involving intuitive states of consciousness—which Theory U tries to invoke (Senge et al 2004). The emerging future is the future the whole system is evolving toward, the future that still needs to be actualized by the system participants, if they choose to look beyond their own wants to find it and the larger meaning it can confer. (This way of seeing the Affective Future in a wider context also helps in resolving the Conative Future, which then sets the focus of actualization.)
The Star represents the Affective Future because it symbolizes the enduring hope and intrinsic aim of the Self which provides a sustained true bearing, reminiscent of the way the North Star can be used in navigation. It is a long-range ideal image of what the Self aspires to be, which may never be achieved exactly as envisaged, but it is a source of future-directed purpose and meaning, able to provide inspiration and orientation. It represents a template for what needs to be accomplished, a future system structure or pattern logic which can easily be forgotten in the exigencies of everyday activity. It is a visionary image of the aspirational future which sets up what Peter Senge called “creative tension” between itself and the Cognitive Future (Senge 1990).
The Conative Future
The Mountain stands for the Conative Future, which is the focus of purposive thinking about the future. It is an image of a chosen and achievable set of future conditions, the goal of intention, and future-generative activity. Psychologically, it represents the conative mental dimension of will power and intention. It is the future world toward which the effort of the Self is directed.
The Conative Future is depicted in the future landscape as a concrete objective lying partway between the Chessboard and the Star. In its default mode it is the future to which the Self is already aiming, not having consciously considered either the Cognitive or Affective Future. It may be identical with the positive Affective Future if that is considered directly attainable. If there is no preferential vision, it may simply be based on either exploiting or hedging against features of the Cognitive Future. Usually, however, it is somewhere between—a pragmatic translation of the Affective Future into a plausibly achievable objective somewhere between the probabilistic Cognitive Future and the aspirational Affective Future. It may consist of hybrid innovations—ideas inspired by the Affective Future but converted into a form that would be workable in the more “realistic” conditions expected in the shorter run Cognitive Future. It is a target future, the goal of strategy and the future action frame—it depicts a future objective which guides action. It is the future we choose to focus on with the aim of bringing it into reality.
The Conative Future includes the activity of the Self in the future world, where it is pioneering a desirable shift inspired by the Affective Future. It depicts a meaningful and rewarding role which suits the identity of the organization in terms of competence, experience, and capability. This type of future picture of the self was described by sociologist Benjamin Singer as a “future-focused role image” (FFRI). The FFRI is “our self-image projected into the future, and it lends meaning to much of what we do in the present.” It is a self-picture the individual has of carrying out a plausibly achievable and desirable role in the future. Having an FFRI represents a belief in the future success of the self and a clearly defined FFRI correlates strongly with the level of effort that is made in the present for a desired future outcome (Singer 1974)
For an individual without this kind of self-image, Singer said, “probability would triumph over possibility” since “the successfully operating human being. . .is the one who is able to master the mechanisms of the possible.” The FFRI is a powerful motivator because it provides the self with an image showing its future role and activity in a world in which worthwhile goals are being accomplished. The FFRI can become a self fulfilling prophesy—“by its presence, it tends to assure the conditions for its own fulfilment.” Without it, an individual’s time perspective will be limited. As psychologist Kurt Lewin explained (as quoted by Singer), “a person is likely to be future-oriented if he feels that a highly valued goal is accessible to him, while a belief that the goal is beyond his reach restricts him to a present orientation.” Equally, if the individual is to look to the future for rewards, there needs to be an assurance “that there will, in fact, be a payoff.”
However, as Singer argued, encouraging the development of personal FFRIs becomes problematic when future shock occurs. As he put it, “The future-focused role-image varies – among persons, among social classes, among societies. It is especially important to search for its components and explain its mechanisms during a time such as this: a time of great flux, of increasing tempos, a time when our social milieu changes rapidly, as organisations disappear and emerge and roles are transformed, created and disappear, seemingly unpredictably.”
Singer was writing in 1974 about the need for the FFRI in education. In the time since then, the routine creation of FFRIs has indeed become essential not just in education but in society at large and in the development of all organizations and institutions. The necessity yet the difficulty of establishing a credible and achievable FFRI in today’s conditions is precisely the value of the Conative Future.
A key point about the future-focused role-image is that the Self is envisaged as existing in a future in which it achieves a satisfying strategic fit. This requires more than simply finding a viable role within a future, but discovering a match between future self and future context which can provide meaning. One way of doing this is to identify the source of purpose and meaning in the ideal state of the Affective Future, and to ask what associated changes, innovations, or reforms can form a goal for strategy in the Conative Future.
Meaning can often be found by seeing the individual or organizational Self as serving—whether consciously or not—a human institution and the social or cultural need that lies at its heart. This concept of human institutions refers not just to organizations within a country, but to fundamental human aspirational activities such as education, health care and justice—the building blocks of human civilization as a whole. The human institution is more enduring and changes more slowly than the specific ways its associated societal need is met. This makes it an insightful frame of analysis, as the influential American architect Louis Kahn recognized when he said, “I know of no greater service an architect can make. . .than to sense that every building must serve an institution of man, whether the institution of government, of home, of learning, or of health, or recreation” (Kahn [1969] 1998).
From this perspective, the FFRI can be clarified by asking three questions. First, what “human institution” does your organization serve and what enduring societal need lies at its heart? Secondly, how will the ideal newness envisaged in the Affective Future affect the way the enduring need will be met? Thirdly, in order to continue to play a vital part in the evolving human institution you serve, how must your activity and role evolve in response to the new ways of meeting the enduring need?
If these questions are addressed, the FFRI comes into focus in the context of the Conative Future. The FFRI answers an implicit question: what do we believe that a player with our identity can realistically contribute to the pioneering future initiatives that the larger system needs? The FFRI within the Conative Future represents the role the Self can have in actualizing or enacting the emergent future—the developmental path that transcends the Cognitive Future, inspired by the Affective Future.
To summarize, the Cognitive Future is a neutral description of futures that may eventuate if things continue as they are without any attempt to avoid bad outcomes or realize good ones. The Affective Future is an image of an emotionally resonant and creatively transformed future which provides meaning, purpose, and inspiration. And the Conative Future is a defined target, an image of a credibly attainable future, in which the Cognitive Future is transformed in the direction of the Affective Future, focusing on the role the Self can play in enacting this future. The central point about these categories of future is that they are differentiated in terms of their psychological significance rather than, say, by the technical method used for generating them, which is more typically the differentiating principle when working with futures.
The Use of Psychological Futures
Having described the three categories of future, it is now possible to consider the contribution they could make to futures thinking, and in particular to the problem, described earlier, of bridging the divide between scenarios and strategy.
The most direct application of the three types of future is in maintaining psychological balance. For this, all three types of future need to be developed, and refined by iteration between them. For an individual or organization, this means having an understanding of what could happen, being aware of what we might want to have happen or not happen, and deciding what we will aim to have happen. All these are necessary for a balanced and complete psychological stance toward the future. If one or more types of future is not considered or developed, strategic understanding, motivation, and options are likely to be compromised. In particular, it is important for psychological health that an individual or indeed organization has a sense of agency. Autonomous choice and the undertaking of a corresponding course of action are the basis of being able to shape the future. If affective or conative futures are underdeveloped it will contribute to a lack of motivation and a weak sense of agency and autonomy. Equally, if there is an over-emphasis on cognitive futures there is a risk of paralysis by analysis. And if the Cognitive Future is underdeveloped or absent there is a risk that action will be unrealistic and based on wishful thinking.
The three psychological futures therefore act as a reminder that our psychological stance toward the future ideally needs to be balanced as well as what that balance involves.
The value that the psychological futures can bring to futures thinking is primarily to ensure a similar balance. The use of a specific futures research method, such as scenario development, tends to lead to the creation of one of the psychological futures, leaving the others under-developed or absent. The use of scenarios in particular leads to well-developed cognitive futures but often without any development of affective scenarios—indeed the GBN-style method usually actively discourages any bias to one or other scenario, on the basis that it compromises the use of scenarios for stress-testing or wind-tunneling. The result is that the set of scenarios heightens the focus on uncertainty, which is usually justified by accompanying rhetoric that the scenario developer needs to “embrace” the uncertainty. The heightened sense of uncertainty then gets in the way of “taking a view” which appears to be the step required for moving to strategy development. As a set, the scenarios deliberately fail to declare which future will happen, so they are unable to provide a basis for strategy formulation other than of the “lowest common denominator” kind that results from searching for options that would be robust in every scenario.
The solution is to use a diverse enough selection of futures methods to ensure that each type of psychological future is developed, and that there is a balance between them. Having a full set of psychological futures will then naturally facilitate the development of strategy.
Futures Methods and Psychological Futures
While it would certainly be possible to invent one or more new futures methods that specifically focus on the three psychological dimensions, the more immediate concern here is to recognize that different existing futures methods tend to emphasize different psychological categories of future. Two methods will illustrate this.
The most obvious example is perhaps the relationship between scenarios and psychological futures, already mentioned above. In a sense, all the categories of psychological future involve scenarios, since they are depictions of possible future worlds. To this extent, all three categories of psychological future taken together could be regarded as meta-scenarios. But of the three categories only the Cognitive Future would conform to the usual scenario discipline of being neutral in terms of probability and preference. Conventional scenario thinking is a method specifically suited to developing cognitive futures that are equally probable and equally preferred. A set of Shell or GBN-style scenarios is therefore a good way of depicting the Cognitive Future. Conversely, a set of such scenarios can normally be interpreted as depicting the Cognitive Future.
Another example is the “three futures” structure of the Three Horizons method (Sharpe 2013), which has proved to be very popular and intuitive. There is a loose correspondence between “Horizon 1” and the Cognitive Future, “Horizon 3” and the Affective Future, and “Horizon 2” and the Conative Future. This similarity primarily arises from the way the method makes use of the three horizons.
There is however a significant difference in the sense that the three horizons are three successive temporal stages on the way into the future. Horizon 1 is a peak representing the present and near future, and is seen as a system inexorably in decline, whereas the Cognitive Future is a future with an indeterminate duration. The three psychological futures co-exist or run in parallel because they are three different categories of potential future, not successive periods extending into the future.
In the Three Horizons method the distinction between the three horizons is time, and their changing prevalence across time, whereas the distinction between the three psychological futures is their meaning to the Self. This meaning is projected into the future, which is what makes the future images psychologically potent, but the meaning is not located in or limited to any particular period in the future. Working with the Three Horizons method represents a journey from the present to the future and back, whereas the three psychological futures are explored and iterated in parallel to enhance the development of the Self.
Nevertheless, the Three Horizons method does work in a way that is congruent with the three psychological futures. Horizon 1 is a projective assessment of future prospects just as is the Cognitive Future. Horizon 3 is a future in which there is a desired transformation as in the Affective Future, and Horizon 2 combines elements of Horizon 1 and Horizon 3 in a form suited to entrepreneurial initiatives, resembling the Conative Future. In this way, the Three Horizons method does tend to lead to the development of all three psychological futures, which may in part explain its popularity. This means there is potential to enhance the use of the Three Horizons method by consciously relating each horizon to its corresponding psychological future. And possibly, the Three Horizons method could serve as a template for a futures method specifically focused on the three psychological futures.
If chosen and combined appropriately, existing futures methods do already provide much of what is needed for working with psychological futures. The principal aim in doing this is to have a balanced and mutually complementary representation of plausible, motivational, and actionable futures, which is the necessary first step in closing the gap between futures and strategies.
Strategy and Psychological Futures
According to strategy expert Richard Rumelt (Rumelt 2011), strategy consists of three things. First, there is a strategic diagnosis—a diagnosis that identifies critical aspects of the situation and defines the specific structure of the challenge. Second, there is a guiding policy—an overall approach to dealing with the challenge by using or creating some kind of leverage or advantage. And thirdly there is a set of coherent actions—coordinated action steps designed to accomplish the policy by working together to focus organizational energy.
It is immediately apparent that these three components map onto the psychological futures. The Cognitive Future will either embody a strategic diagnosis or provide the basis for one—and if it does not this should be taken as a sign that it needs further development. The Affective Future will depict a guiding image, based on the Self’s affective response to the diagnosis provided by the Cognitive Future. And the Conative Future represents the practical objective towards which coherent actions will be directed. Not only does a full set of psychological futures provide an information and insight base for each aspect of strategy formulation, but the structure of strategy itself helps to clarify what the content of each psychological future needs to be.
The reason for the scenarios to strategy divide now becomes evident. A set of Shell-style scenarios represents the development of the Cognitive Future, which provides only the first step needed for strategy. Without conscious development of the Affective and Conative Futures the decision maker has no means of cutting through the uncertainty displayed in the scenarios. This is because there is always residual uncertainty in any cognitive assessment of the future, and the only way to collapse it is to switch psychological mode from sensing and interpreting to choice and agency. If scenario development were to be used in combination with other methods that lead to the Affective and Conative Futures, then the future-oriented dimension of all three components of strategy would be generated and the “scenarios to strategy problem” would disappear.
The broader lesson for futures work is that if the intention is to use it for strategy development, either a combination of methods or a single method with a wide enough range should be used. As discussed above, the Three Horizons would be an example of a single method that is potentially able to generate all three psychological futures and thus all the elements needed for strategy—though to do this it would need some modification.
It is not my aim here to propose a new futures method as such, but I will make one suggestion to illustrate the potential. A possible psychological-futures adaptation of the Three Horizons approach might be to replace the horizontal time dimension with an axis running from Cognitive on the left to Affective on the right, with the Conative Future in the middle. The three horizons would then become the “Cognitive Horizon,” the “Conative Horizon,” and the “Affective Horizon.” If scenarios were used in the development of the Cognitive Horizon, the result could be a hybrid method with the intrinsic ability to avoid the scenarios to strategy problem.
Conclusion
In my original 1999 paper I suggested that the future could be seen as a psychological landscape, which helped to clarify aspects of futures work and shed some light on the limitations of scenarios. This paper reflects on and partly extends that idea, to reinterpret the elements of the landscape as being psychologically distinct images of the future.
As society becomes more complex and the challenges we face have consequences that extend further into the future, there is naturally a demand for improved anticipatory ability. The emergence of new psychological time constructs may well play a role in enhancing decision making for long time frames in conditions of complexity. Since an increase in complexity has been linked to the probability of societal collapse (Tainter 1990), such time constructs will have survival value if they lead to better strategy and thereby increase the returns to investment in further complexity.
This paper argues that there are three distinct types of psychological future and that when all three are evenly developed it becomes easier to link futures thinking to strategy. In effect, this is a new time construct that could contribute to more effective decision making and strategy at a time when global social, economic, and environmental systems are all under unprecedented stress.
It could also prove helpful to the wider understanding of futures research, as well as resolving one of the most common reasons decision makers are unenthusiastic about scenarios—and sometimes futures more generally—the lack of an obvious relationship between scenarios and strategy formulation.
The feedback I have received about the concept of the psychological landscape indicates that it is both helpful and memorable. I hope that the idea of three psychological futures will prove to be a useful complementary concept. Just possibly, both ideas will make a contribution to the effectiveness of thinking about the future and, ideally, improve our chances of surviving and thriving as a global society.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
