The Power of Hard Visions
Throughout my career as a futurist, I’ve had the opportunity to work with both disenfranchised communities and large corporations. While these two groups may seem very different, I discovered that the key to helping both create better futures lies in empowering them to act within their current realities using “hard visions” based on systems thinking and multiple future scenarios.
I spent a very meaningful part of my career as a futurist working for a foundation. It was committed to supporting disenfranchised communities that were instituting systemic solutions to community building. Initially this was a confusing for me. How could a futurist help communities improve the immediate challenges they were facing? Was it right to take time and effort to explore the future from community members, many who were working multiple jobs to support their families? Luckily, the community leaders knew better than me how important looking ahead was for their neighborhoods. The time I spent in these communities gave me important insights into the practice of foresight. I also learned a ton about myself and the world from the residents of these communities.
How to do visioning was high on the list of things I learned. Traditional visioning exercises often resulted in a generic, singular, and idealized future that felt disconnected from their current situations: thriving businesses in multi-use built environments with people living close to their work, children playing in clean and safe natural spaces for recreation, and no cars. There was no path from their daily lived experiences to that vision, leaving residents disempowered.
I quickly pivoted to using multi-stakeholder scenario planning and systems thinking. The process started with a card-sorting exercise to cluster trends. By allowing residents to physically manipulate the cards, they gained a sense of control over the factors impacting their lives. Through discussions and causal loop diagrams, they explored alternative futures and identified leverage points within them for creating positive change. This process led to the development of "hard visions" - concrete plans that accounted for different future scenarios and included interventions within their power to implement. Instead of a disempowering single “soft vision” that was disconnected from their reality, residents had practical ways to move forward in conditions of high uncertainty. The sense of agency these hard visions provided was remarkable.
Returning to corporate work, I wondered how to apply these lessons in an environment focused on customer value and shareholder returns. After a few years I settled into applying foresight to innovation – innovation that included new business models and ways of organizing business systems, not just technical or scientific discovery.
It turns out that companies are wired to solve hard problems. Using systems thinking to develop scenarios and leverage points to find preferred interventions worked for their leaders too. For several of the companies I worked with, we were initially not even allowed to mention climate change in senior-level meetings. Working with trends in systems leaders were confronted by the problems climate change, inequity, and a lack of diversity were causing their own companies and shareholders. By the end of the engagements these companies were looking at investing in fundamental science and new business practices to create solutions to climate change and diversity problems they could directly impact.
The sense of agency the scenario-building process created carried over to innovation. Instead of a few ideas, people ideated hundreds of potential solutions. The innovations not only served customers and preserved the companies right to operate, they also improved their communities and the environment. Instilling a perception that you can make a difference seems to open creativity for inventors and leaders.
Since those engagements 10-15 years ago, these companies have invested hundreds of millions of dollars on climate and diversity solutions, often many years ahead of others in their industries. Simple lesson here – come to these companies telling them to embrace a soft vision of a fully regenerative, totally equitable society and you will get nowhere. Leaders will not see how it creates value for customers and shareholders, and no way for their companies to participate in solutions. Engage them instead in systems-level discussions and suddenly they can see opportunities for their companies to be ahead of the curve and solve problems before their competitors.
It is often said the caterpillar does not dream it will become a butterfly. But the building blocks to become one are not exogenous, they exist within the caterpillar in its very DNA. A butterfly is not made by an external force transplanting DNA into it. The caterpillar makes its own chrysalis. We must build better futures on the dynamics of today.
We all want better futures than pasts. Even leaders of companies most targeted for their extractive and inequitable practices. Instead of disempowering companies with talk of a future vision they are legally not allowed to pursue due to a fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders, engage them in conversations based on the dynamics of future scenarios and empower them to create solutions. There are many paths to preferred futures. Having a scenario-based “hard visions” approach versus a singular “soft vision” increases agency and participation.