George Lucas turned 80 a few weeks ago. If there's one thing the creator of Star Wars has proven throughout his life, it's that you don't need a crystal ball to think about the future. We can imagine potential future scenarios based on the signals the present lets us glimpse.
Galileo Galilei or Thomas Edison were some of those who knew how to do this and proved the validity of this concept. But so did Steve Jobs: long before his competitors, the creator of the iPhone knew that the life cycle of chips would lead humans to manage the world with their fingertips.
Today, we find ourselves in a similar moment. Artificial intelligence challenges and provokes us. However, through the design of future scenarios, we can prepare and, better yet, anticipate. Both Lucas and Jobs serve to understand that the scenarios we can and should dare to think about start with an idea that may seem fanciful, implausible, or utopian, but that, in many cases, ends up being real and practical.
The Future as a Starting Point
Usually, as individuals and as part of an organization, we tend to look too much at the past or too much at the future. In the past, we seek lived experiences, reasons to explain a mistake ("Since we haven't improved last year's revenues...") or to justify an achievement ("Thanks to restructuring that area..."). Meanwhile, towards the future, we often project our goals, desires, and also our fears and doubts. An example could be: "Based on last year's sales, we should earn XX million if we want to maintain the company's economic sustainability."
In summary, the past allows us to revel in our successes, our experiences, and invites us to try to repeat them using recipes that worked back then. And we look to the future with that mix of dreams and desires to which fears and uncertainty are incorporated, knowing that, usually, fear tends to win over the dream.
Changing the Probable for the Plausible
But in both cases, we forget a key variable: the present. Our current reality is usually not part of our strategy. From childhood to university, through a master's or an MBA, we were taught that the present is anything but valuable. The present is transient, it is ephemeral. The present is this second, this moment. Nothing more. However, if we look closely, the present always leaves us signals of what is to come; of the trends that are beginning to emerge and those that are starting to fade.
These signals become a tangible basis for projection. Because the question is: How do we go from potentially probable to factually plausible? The play on words is not accidental. It represents a change in perspective: my goal is no longer to prepare for what might come, but to prepare for what the signals of my present indicate is changing.
So, when we identify the signals that run through the present, we give our future a possibility, a little more certainty, we significantly reduce the number of unknowns, even if a black swan might appear. The future stops being an amorphous space and starts to become a set of possible scenarios based on present evidence, not on desires or fears. We thus move towards a future that we can design, for which we can prepare, whose foundation has its anchor in the reality of the present.
This is what designing future scenarios for organizations is about: learning to identify the signals that are present today and projecting our raison d'être as a company, our purpose, towards that combination of signals. Doing so allows us to stop being observers of our destiny and start designing it.
Steve Jobs was not the only one who knew how to do this. There have been others who have known how to recognize signals that others do not see, behavioral changes that indicate what is to come, and prepare for it. This is the case of John von Neumann with his work on game theory and computer architecture; Buckminster Fuller with geodesic domes and his holistic approach to sustainable design; or Alan Turing with his work on artificial intelligence, up to Elon Musk or Sam Altman.
How to Recognize the Signals
Signals are what connect us to the future, and to be able to design it, we need to know how to recognize and work with them. It's about taking advantage of the present because there lies our raw material. Because if we look directly at the future, we will never be able to understand it until it is too late and has become the present.
There are signals that we usually decide to ignore because they do not fit with the rules of the present game, they are governed by rules of the game that have not yet been written. We can see them, we can hear them, they are factual, we can refer to them. And if they have happened over the past year, it means they are current, they have not faded, they can become stronger and eventually become part of our world.
Designing futures is working as much as possible to understand the present much more. It's about increasing the probabilities of occurrence of the futures that suit us or making the most probable futures end up suiting us.
In summary, to prepare for what is to come, you don't need to be a seer: just take the time to focus, identify the signals, and imagine ourselves and our organizations in that world. Because we can all dare to be a little George Lucas, but much more, Steve Jobs.
If you want to learn more about future scenarios, click here.
By Gabriel Weinstein, partner and Managing Partner at Olivia in Europe
