Diary of a Futurist: Six Lenses for Seeing the Future Differently

thing. I don't mind being an outsider, but I think I'm actually an inbetweener. I think that's really what I am. I'm an inbetweener. I've decided I'm an inbetweener, partly because the Inbetweener was always like my favourite, like, superhero character type thing. But also, I come from the Midlands, so it's not north and it's not south. So I think I actually grew up being an inbetweener and appreciating that it's neither— it's not that it's neither one thing or another, it's just that there's a place that you can occupy, which is in between, which is very interesting, which again will give you one perspective and then another perspective. A tool which is, you write down what you think the underlying assumption is to something, an idea, a concept, an action, a decision, an agreement, whatever, and then you just flip it. Just flip the assumption that lies underneath and then see what the outcome of that is. And it was fascinating as it takes you into a place that you probably had a blind spot about, just because you're a little bit stuck and didn't realize that everything you were talking about or envisaging or imagining, but actually relied on an underlying assumption. And until you get to those, you start messing about with them, challenging them, turning them upside down and inside out, your blind spots continue. I think this is a very good example of one of the ways you can use AI really productively and creatively, which is to challenge it, you know, the where are my blind spots? If I was to reverse this assumption, I mean, it's better to do it in your head because you're, You're training that muscle to attack your own thinking, if you like. But you can use it with AI, and if you haven't got much time and you're on a project or something like that, I'm always asking it, what are my blind spots? What have I missed here? But if I was somebody else in the market who thought exactly the opposite, where would that net out? Because this is great. This is all the mind mapping you can do and starting to realize where your competitors would end up because they've got a different underlying assumption. You know, all those sorts of things we're supposed to do as strategists, but sometimes forget to do because, you know, you're on another piece which is going to be out quite soon, which is called The System and Self. And one of the first iterations of it is a card deck. So I'm very conscious again of agency. I think agency will reside in people. It does reside in people. At the moment is being trained out of us. So we don't realize we have personal agency. The system, as it becomes more infrastructural and AI becomes embedded, guides you to behaviors and kind of circumvents your choice. You don't even realize you have a choice on something because you're so in the system then, just like a cog in this big machine. And so there's an academic paper on this that is a preprint, it's just been peer-reviewed right now, but The card deck is the first interpretation or iteration of it. And the card deck has, it's a bit like a tarot pack and it's got lots of system cards and lots of self cards. And you draw one system and one self card and you basically challenge yourself to reflect on, actually, do I have more personal agency in this situation than I thought I did? Or how should I interpret, reinterpret, or, or re-perceive the situation where I can do something about this? I'm happy to send, but I think just add to that point you're making and to give you a model that I think quite interesting. It's the Futures Triangle, because when you work with groups of people and you're looking at Futures Triangle, I mean, I take the point about the death of an old identity and the birthing of a new one. I do agree with that, although it's, it's quite a complicated matter. That is, with the Futures Triangle, you can try and look at insight, hindsight, and foresight. You can try and look at all of those. So in each corner of the triangle, you've got like the push of the present, the pull of the future, and the weight of the past. And I think it's really great if you can get groups of people to really work around that. You're trying to get them to understand that future is contested. We've all got different points of view, come together, but can you create or agree at least on a plausible possible future in the middle of that triangle? But what it does do is give— it acknowledges the importance of the past, the weight, but it calls it the weight of the past. This is Sohail's kind of model, and well, one of his amazing models for futures work. And the question is, how much of the past do you want to drag into the future? How much do you want to bring with you? You might want to something, but not all of it. Not everything that got you to where you are today isn't gonna serve you going forward. And of course you've gotta have a vision of the future. Otherwise, if you don't have a vision of the future, you've no idea where you're going. So you can't really make any decisions about anything. And then you've got the push of the present, which is like all the trends and the kind of stuff that's propelling you, nudging you in certain directions. I do think that is an interesting tool. I don't mean in a sort of, you know, workshop environment. I just think as a mental model. That's a good tool for people to try and balance those three elements. And then there's this new world emerging, and everyone was talking about solo mo and the new, you know, mo, you remember that? And South by Southwest was such a big thing then, everybody's like, oh, digital, and it's all about, you know, location won't matter anymore. Arguably, location's more important now than it was, you know, ever. And all these sorts of interesting things, and we knew that planning was completely changing and that people were starting social media departments, if you like, and going, "What's your Facebook strategy?" And so we were in between these worlds again. And I do find that fascinating. Same as futures, I guess that's what futures is. You're in between worlds, in between these temporal, these horizons, these time horizons. And I think it just, the in-between places are the most interesting places to be. You'll never pin me down. And I think as we go into a world of automation and AI, where we do end up living much more distributed lives with distributed selves, for example, this is much more modern and a better way to think about it. So I think about it as a database self, not a design self. And funnily enough, we're just about to put out a piece, a piece of work on applying this to brands. Because actually, if you're thinking about yourself as an identity, You can say the same thing for brands, that brands need to think of themselves as a database brand. It's