3 Lenses to View the Future

There are 3 lenses that we need to use in order to view the future. I'm Charlotte Kemp, Futures Alchemist, and here are the 3 lenses. Our first one is that of philosophy. We actually need to slow down, stop, debate, have conversations, think about what defines a good futures plan. What is a good future for some people that might be negative for others? How do we evaluate the impact of a good futures plan? You can test this if you've ever complained in the past about, this wasn't what I was expecting, but when asked, you weren't able to really clearly define what it was you were expecting. That's because we're not clear on the philosophy of what it is we're looking for, what it is that we want, what will make us happy or satisfied or actually be good for us. So that's philosophy. The second lens is that of psychology. Everything about the future implies change, and managing change is one of the primary stages that we go through in creating good futures plans. So how do we as humans manage that change? How do we initiate change? How do we respond to change imposed on us? How do we cope with new technologies arriving every day, to potential restrictions with legislation or governments? All of these change elements are really essential for us to understand and to manage properly in order to have a good futures plan. And then our third lens is that of practicality. We need to now define what are the practical tools we can use. How do we use tools to understand the future? What tools can we use to change direction of our future? How can we project what might come in the future? All of those practical tools are available to us. So there you go, 3 lenses: philosophy, psychology, practicality. Who doesn't love alliteration? And then, of course, we bring them together in a gorgeous Venn diagram. And that Venn diagram shows us what happens if we don't have all 3 of those lenses focused correctly. For example, if we only focus on the psychology of change and the practical tools that we need to use, and we bring these together in the Venn diagram, and we're not concentrating on the philosophy, we're not considering what is, what is a good future, a preferable future versus something we don't don't want, then we come up with a plan, but it's, it's an irrelevant plan. It's a plan that actually won't work in the future because it's not going to design for us the future that we're looking for. If we only look at philosophy and practicality, then we come up with an implausible plan, a plan that theoretically might be good, but the human beings are just not going to be able to respond to this or create this. And if we look at philosophy and psychology, but we ignore the practical tools, then we come up with an implausible plan. An idealistic vision of what we could have, but we have no practical way to achieve that. When you bring all 3 of those lenses together in focus, you get an ideal plan. We have a plan that embraces how humans actually respond to change, and we have a plan with good practical tools that will help us to understand and to make the changes that are necessary. Those are our 3 lenses for looking at the future and creating a good strategic foresight or futures thinking plan.