How Science Fiction Imaginings Provides Strategic Thinking Pathways

JUSTIN MATTHEWS / TOROA / ACCELERATOR 02 CONFERENCE

PRESENTATION VIDEO

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PRESENTATION SLIDES

The present age we live in is a complicated yet dynamic age, an era of expanding technological change and shifting cultural sophistications. The world we inhabit is not always a straight arrow to navigate. It’s an exciting time to experience but its unpredictability makes it also a difficult terrain to chart and define strategic directions.

“Change is the new normal” for the world where few things remain static. Our hyper-connected landscape in which we all inhabit both directly and indirectly is a shifting alchemy of new ideas and reframing of old ones that constantly can put goals and strategic initiatives on uneven ground. The VUCA of our “lived” world creates persistent challenges around forecasting and generating plans for how to operate in an environment that is hostile to stability.

<aside> ◼️ Our world recently experienced the rapid shifts of modern times with the rise of COVID and the global pandemic. We saw entire industries shrink or effectively go onto life support. For example, it is not likely that many airlines had a complete shutdown of global boarders and the end of tourism in their strategic plans for 2020 and beyond. Dramatic, radical change has been forced upon them along with many other industries that now deal with a world that shifted on the ‘normal axis’ overnight. This instability in the global environment is likely to increase in a world battling the climate crisis, future pandemics, rapid technological change and on-going political strife.

As Sherryl Vint, editor of the book ‘The Futures Industry’ states in her introduction:

“The future has become a site of crisis, both materially—in the looming threats of climate change, environmental and species destruction, and imminent collapses of the global financial market—and in our capacity to imagine the future otherwise, as a site of utopian promise.”

A method for navigating this territory is needed. A way to plan future strategic narratives that offer insights for mapping a world that does not sit still and is prone to drastic directional shifts. A method may exist in the area of Future Studies and the job of the Futurist by offering a way to act as a sherpa for the locality of our turbulent times.

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Studying of the future has been defined by a number of names over time. It has been called “prospective study”, “futuribles” and “prognostics” in previous incarnations. More common terms today are “futurology” and “futuring” although these have now given way to the use of the terms “foresight” or “foresight strategy”. Along with the use of different terms the meaning of studying the future has different definitions of what it represents as a domain of investigation. Despite the array of terms and the intentions of what it investigates the core aspects of ‘future studies’ continues to revolve around the need to examine and divine knowledge of choices for personal, possible, probable and/or preferable futures. (See Jagerson, 2015)

<aside> ◼️ WHAT IS IT? Those that formally study the future are often called ‘futurists’. The business of a ‘futurist’ is to discover, investigate, examine and then analyse future possibilities which are then offered to persons, entities, businesses or government sectors to integrate these learnings into their own needs around strategic decision making.

This process is aimed at attaining a sense of ‘foresight’ of what is to come and to achieve this ‘foresight’ many different areas and subjects and how they are shifting must be explored so a futurist can offer predictions or outcomes of what may be ahead. Importantly, a futurist aims to offer a number of alternative futures that can be chosen from and of which any may indeed turn out to be the future or none of them. Either way the opportunity to have this type of informational space allows organisations the ability to prepare for the most reasonable possible futures. (See Jagerson, 2015).

The growth of futures studies has expanded recently as the world becomes increasingly risky (Inayatullah, 2013). This growth in VUCA for the modern world has seen futures studies “eagerly adopted by executive leadership teams and planning departments in organizations, institutions and nations throughout” the globe (Inayatullah, 2013).

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