What is the larger pattern? Changing our fundamental information, communications, and infrastructure changes our society in very dramatic ways. Why? Because of power dynamics. New media tools alter who has the voice, who has the platform, and who has the ability to shape opinion. In Gutenberg’s days, the authority was with the church, which held the ultimate truth. But with the printing press, people could distribute leaflets. Luther nailed his thesis on the church doors. At that time, the transformation in the media led to social transformations, to scientific revolution, and even to wars. Eventually people created new rules, new regulations, new principles around how to value and assess this information and how to decide who has the authority to say what is true or not true. We are in the process of trying to figure this out again. This is our Gutenberg moment.
#4: Uncover patterns
Ultimately, the goal of aggregating signals and connecting these to the larger historical context helps us understand patterns of change—the deeper tides I mentioned earlier. It helps us understand how we got to key developments shaping our future. What is the larger story? What are the tides of change? At the Institute for the Future, we’ve been working with a pattern that we call the Two-Curve Framework. It comes from Ian Morrison, former president of the Institute for the Future, who wrote the book The Second Curve. In the book Morrison argues that in any period of large transformation—which I think we’re going through now—we are simultaneously living along two curves (see figure 2).
Source: Ian Morrison, Institute for the Future, 1996
The first curve is the descending curve. This is the curve we’ve lived on for a long time. We have rules, we have regulations, we have usage patterns, we know how to live this way. But that way of doing things is slowly declining, and we don’t know the exact angle of the decline. At the same time, a new way of doing things is emerging: a nascent curve. We’re in the early stages—we’re just now seeing signals of it—but this curve tells us something about a new way of doing things.
What we see, and what I write about in my book The Nature of the Future, is that the declining curve, the curve on which we’ve existed for a long time, is the curve of institutional production. It is a system in which most resources—money and people—are concentrated in large formal organizations, whether corporations, news organizations, or colleges/universities. But this way of doing things is on the decline. We’re moving from institutional production to what I call socialstructed creation. In this way of doing things, a platform engages large numbers of people to create something that no formal organization could, with no or very little formal structure. The best example is Wikipedia. Today, the Wikipedia Foundation has about 300 staff and contractors, but the online encyclopedia has millions of contributors and billions of users from all around the world. Together they created what no one organization could create. We’re seeing this new way of doing things in open-source software, in the news media, and in other parts of our lives.
Moving from the old to the new curve requires one to behave like an immigrant. I am an immigrant to this country, and I strongly believe that we are all immigrants to the future. We are all moving somewhere new, so it is good to have the mindset of an immigrant. When you’re an immigrant, you must learn a new language, a new culture, a new way of doing things. These are exactly the attitudes and skills we need to bring to thinking about and shaping our future. We must be open to learning a new language, a new culture, a new way of doing things.
#5: Create a community
Being a futurist or thinking about the future is not a solitary affair. I have a lot of distrust for people who say: “I’m a futurist. I went to a mountaintop, and I saw this vision, and this is your future.” That’s not real futurism. Thinking about the future is a collaborative and highly communal affair. It requires a diversity of views. We need to involve experts from many different domains. When we think about anything, from higher education to work, we need to include people who bring different perspectives on the topic—demographics, economics, technology, artificial intelligence, organizations. We need young people in the room. A robust forecast is a collective endeavor; it’s very much a product of collective intelligence. So, if you’re going to create a sensing and signaling mechanism in your organization, make sure you’re not bringing in people who all think the same way. Be sure to create a diverse group of people who can contribute their varied experiences and their differing knowledge to give you much more robust views of the future.
A few years ago, the Institute for the Future brought together a group of experts and contributors to develop a forecast that ties together innovations in blockchain technologies, new patterns of working and learning, and new forms of assessment. The product of this research was a provocative video scenario titled Learning Is Earning 2026. What if we could bring blockchain and new reputation systems together in education? What would that scenario look like? What would it mean for students? For educators? What challenges would be created? We produced the video to raise these questions and to provoke conversations.
Conclusion
Fifty years ago, Alvin Toffler warned us of the impending “future shock,” a condition not unlike the culture shock experienced by travelers to foreign countries, involving disorientation, irrationality, and malaise. “Imagine not merely an individual but an entire society, an entire generation—including its weakest, least intelligent, and most irrational members—suddenly transported into this new world. The result is mass disorientation, future shock on a grand scale.”
We seem to be living Toffler’s future today. Between climate change, media disruption, and the rise of automation and machine intelligence, many people are feeling like they are victims rather than makers of the future: they are victims of the future shock. To overcome this malaise, we must answer Toffler’s call to make futures thinking a way of life not just for a few innovators in Silicon Valley but for everyone—including students, educators, and average citizens.
At its best, futures thinking is not about predicting the future; rather, it is about engaging people in thinking deeply about complex issues, imagining new possibilities, connecting signals into larger patterns, connecting the past with the present and the future, and making better choices today. Futures thinking skills are essential for everyone to learn in order to better navigate their own lives and to make better decisions in the face of so many transformations in our basic technologies and organizational structures. The more you practice futures thinking, the better you get. The five principles outlined above—not focusing on predictions, uncovering signals, understanding historical trajectories, weaving together larger patterns, and bringing diverse voices into the conversation—should help you on your journey of making futures thinking a way of life for you and your community.
Marina Gorbis is executive director of the Institute for the Future. She is the author of The Nature of the Future: Dispatches from the Socialstructed World.
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