The Futures Funnel
When it comes to the longer-term Future, prediction is a mugs game. There are simply too many moving parts and too many unknowns. Prediction demands accuracy and when it comes to the future, accuracy is in short supply.
This is not to say that we shouldn’t think about the Future; we should. But there are useful ways of thinking about the Future in a systematic way that don’t rest on the false certainty of predictions.
For short and medium-term futures, there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that using forecasts that are directionally correct are useful.
For longer term Futures thinking we must leave forecasts behind.
Instead, when shaping longer-term Product Strategy, exploring possible futures is a worthwhile endeavour. It's useful to systematically traverse the space of what could unfurl, to develop a point-of-view on the types of future that we may want. That point-of-view shapes what we can and should do to make that Future happen.
Conversely, exploring Speculative Futures provides a detailed perspective on what futures we don't want. That learning, and explicitly calling attention to it, allows us to take corrective and evasive action.
This sounds nebulous.
It's not as nebulous as you might imagine. Design and development are always future-facing. They wrestle with the uncertain guesses of what will be wanted in future. They navigate between cold, hard reality and the impossible.
To constrain this uncertainty, most designers, developers and strategists operate in the probable. This space of Probable Futures describes what is likely to happen unless there is some extreme interruption or state change; a war, a pandemic, a financial crash. Or a paradigm shift in technology. It makes sense that most of our thought is oriented toward this cone; this represents our best chances of success. When designs and plans are evaluated they are usually evaluated against this background of the Probable. Though this assumption is very rarely acknowledged.
While Probable Futures recognise the uncertainty within a broadly stable, linear environment they do not account for possibilities introduced by extreme (but not necessarily unlikely) change.
The Futures Funnel pictured above helps us to explore beyond the usual, by explicitly emphasising futures outside the probable.
To explore these possibility spaces beyond the Probable, we use Scenarios.
Scenarios are open-ended what-if questions that opens up spaces of discussion, debate and exploration. They are not intended as a destination but a medium through which we outline what a desirable destination could be.
To be truly useful, a Scenario should be provocative. Scenarios are not intended to be granular in detail, with meticulously-mapped paths from the present. They could exist. Practically, this requires participants to suspend their disbelief. Scenarios in many ways are methodical playgrounds; these are tools we use to expand our vision. They encourage us to include futures beyond the obvious extrapolations from existing trends and set our search in settings far from the beaten path of what’s next.
And so, we cast the net wider. To look for less probable but still Plausible Futures.
Plausible Futures is the domain of scenario planning and strategy teams. It is the space of what could happen. Examining Plausible Futures is not about prediction but rather about exploring alternative macroeconomic, technological and cultural futures and mapping that to what it means for an organisation or product.
Further removed from present reality lie Possible Futures - the space of all possibilities that do not contradict the Laws of Physics. Typically these are narrowed down to those where a path from the present, while unlikely, is at least feasible. Why spend time and attention here? Because unlikely futures happen all the time. Because unexpected futures happen more often than we like to think. And because tapping into a broader array of possibilities can unlock a rich vein of ideas.
Individual Possible Futures are rarely neutral. The contain vastly different fortunes. And so, it is important to identify which futures do we wish to move towards. And which futures do we want to engineer a path to avoid.
This cone of Preferable Futures is where we want to play. This cone is what we want to identify as part of Futures work. The Futures that are preferable to the individual, to the organisation and to society.
Only by understanding what is preferable can we begin to coherently engineer a strategy to bring us there.
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Sources & Inspiration
Design and Future by Stuart Candy et al.
Speculative Everything by Dunne and Raby.
Superforecasters by Philip Tetlock.
Foresight Skills by Jane McGonigal at the Institute For The Future