Owning Our Future, Continued
Part two in a series exploring the future of organizations
What do you want work to be like 10 years from now? Not what are you worried work will be like, or what will you accept, but what do you want?
Last week, we teed up a challenge we see occurring in so many organizations: Too many of us are living in the Anti-Futures Triangle. Our energy goes into feeling nostalgia for what once was, or worry about what might be next. Only 64% of major firms plan further than five years ahead, while a minuscule 1.2% think beyond a decade.
But what opens up when organizations shift from worrying about the future to imagining what’s possible? And how do we begin? In this follow up post, we’ll explore these questions.
Imagining Preferred Organizations
Imagining the organizations we prefer is a distinct act within futures thinking. We’re not trying to predict the future. Nor are we trying to plan how an organization may react to a range of plausible scenarios. This is also not an exercise in organizational design (please, please do not allow your futures thinking practice to spark a premature re-org!).
Rather, the task at hand is to imagine multiple, preferred future organizations that might enable your purpose at a selected future date—and then courageously choose one to pursue.
When done well, the result is a clear, shared ambition, along with an emerging hypothesis about how you might move towards your desired future. Said another way: The result is an organizational strategy you can put into practice.
There are quite a few concepts packed into the above, so let’s expand on them:
Start with your purpose: No, we will not quote Simon Sinek. Yes, you should start by ensuring there is a reason your organization exists. What is the mission or purpose of your organization in the world? Futures thinking is a practice of considering how your organization may shape-shift in order to fuel your mission at a future date.
Anchor your time horizon: Does your preferred future organization exist 5, 10, 25, or even 50 years out? We’ll say it: We tend to choose a 10-year time horizon. It’s a long enough arc to allow our minds to push the boundaries of possibility, yet it comes quickly. Ten years requires fast steps towards action.
Who is at the table for this exercise? Futures thinking is not a solo activity. Its power comes from bringing people together to consider multiple versions of the future. Will your futures be envisioned by a small team of executives who share decision-making rights? Will you create a forum for all staff to consider and contribute? Will clients, customers, or shareholders have a voice? There is no one right set of people, but consider the implications of your selection. A good question to start with: Who are the communities that may help fuel your mission, and who are the communities you impact?
Remember, an organization is a system: You are envisioning a system of interacting components. What are the goals of this system? Who or what is present there? How might the work flow? How might decisions get made? Who or what feels the impact of this system’s behaviors? Don’t get too hung up on designing all of the parts, but remember that change lives in the interconnections between them.
Imagine in multiples: This practice requires expansive thinking, and we love it for that (you can read more about why in our strategy field guide). We encourage you to deliberately explore multiple scenarios for your organization. Before you get attached, visit each one. Stay for a while. Look around. Each scenario is a muse that offers inspiration and implications, not the goal.
Prioritize preferences even over predictions: We’re making a deliberate case to focus energy on preferred futures. This means noticing signals of changes both inside and outside your organization, and cross-referencing those with the conviction of your purpose or mission. Shift the group’s energy from the gravitational pull of the past, and towards the promise of the future you want to work in together.
Invite play: This isn’t overtly mentioned earlier, but in my experience, futures thinking is most effective when we cultivate space for imaginative play. Using our imaginations to play is a distinctly human act. It is also how we experiment and learn. Unfortunately, most of us don’t usually have permission to play at work. But imagining and enacting the future requires that we deliberately create spaces where it is safe to explore, disagree, experiment, and fail.
Emerging Evidence
We know that activities like futures thinking have a tendency to be dismissed as luxurious thought experiments. But there is emerging evidence this is exactly the type of activity leaders need to make space for during times of rapid change and uncertainty.
Just last month, The Wharton School of Business published a study of gaming studios experimenting with AI adoption. They observed four stages of AI adoption. In stage one, organizations introduced LLMs and stopped there. In stage two they attempted to introduce new workflows. In stage three, AI produced knowledge that previously required multiple teams to work together, changing how collaboration occurred.
But it was only at stage four that these studios experienced impactful productivity gains. At stage four, the studios essentially practiced futures thinking: They wiped the slate clean and asked, “What is the ideal organization we want, if we let go of how the present and past are dragging us down?”
The studios that imagined their preferred organization from scratch saw leaps in productivity. Of 20 interviews, only three studios reached this stage. The differentiator was not the technology. It was the willingness to design forward, to a desired future, rather than from a current state.
Where to Begin
The leaders who successfully navigate this moment will share a trait: They’ll have moved from reactive adoption (keeping up with AI news and chasing the tool of the week) to intentional design (clarity on their preferred future and a disciplined path toward it).
If you are following “future of work in the age of AI” discourse at all, you are likely familiar with Block’s recent experiment in org design. In some ways, Jack Dorsey is practicing futures thinking here: He’s imagining one preferred future organization, and then running experiments large and small to nudge Block in its direction.
While I don’t know if the Block team explored multiple preferred futures before selecting one to move towards, I can appreciate that, at its core, this is a very real application of futures thinking in effort to create a new type of organization. And if you don’t like the future Dorsey is building, remember that the act of futures thinking is not owned by Block, Sequoia, nor anyone in Silicon Valley. We can each take agency through our own actions.
And that is the point I’d like to leave you with: The organizations that thrive in 2036 will be the ones whose leaders make deliberate choices today about what they want to become tomorrow. 🔮
First, a bit of a turn from my comment on Part 1 — I admittedly got a little hyperfocused there on the how does this come to life question and the macro conditions for the BCG scenarios. Thank you for this piece as it's inspiring and pulls me back to the practice of futures thinking itself. The multiples piece really lands, and so does the order of operations underneath it (preferences first, feasibility second, which I clearly did in reverse in my comment to Part 1!)
What I'm wondering now, in my current seat, is what futures thinking looks like for leaders who AREN'T at the very top. If you're an executive (head of a department, a rung or two down from the C-suite, or a strategic consultant running point for a client), you have the judgment to do this work, and often the closest visibility into where the organization actually needs to head. But you may not have the authority to call when the slate gets wiped or which preferred future gets pursued. The actual adoption and implementation isn't yours. Two questions that leads me to that I'd love your take on, because I don't have the answers:
1) How do you get a seat at the table where the imagining is happening, as someone whose preferred futures count as inputs to the choice if you're not already there?
2) If you CAN'T get a seat at that table, how do you practice futures thinking for your part within the organization anyway, knowing the adoption decision will get made above you, often without you in the room, and often based on factors (board pressure, parent-company politics, quarterly numbers) that the imagining couldn't simulate?
I've attempted some of this type of work in roles like the ones I named above, where I (and/or folks like me) cared about futures thinking, could see what their organization needed, while operating inside large, matrixed, global structures where the call ultimately wasn't ours to make — with mixed results. Curious for your take of what the practice could/should look like in roles like that?